Revolutionary dreaming

Revolutionary dreams tend to be envisioned as dreams of the future: day dreams, prophetic dreams, dreams that picture a wildly different world. Euphoric, expansive, utopian – revolutionary dreaming is an imaginative act that reaches beyond the parameters of the oppressive present.

Revolutionary dreaming is a ‘vision of an elsewhere’ (Jackie Wang). The revolutionary dreamer refuses to be constrained by pragmatic injunctions to remain ‘realistic, prudent, and pessimistic’ (Richard Stites). ‘The map to a new world is in the imagination’ (Robin D.G. Kelley). 

Psychoanalysts are usually more interested in the dreams dreamt at night than in daydreams or visionary imaginings. Freud might have claimed that every dream is the fulfilment of a wish, but he did not see the dream as the vision of a better world. Dreams are cluttered with junk and detritus from the past heaped on top of other, more significant, junk and detritus from the past. 

It’s axiomatic to say that dreams are boring, but I don’t really get that. I often turn down the page when I come across a dream in whatever I’m reading. 

Towards the end of her autobiographical novel Daughter of the Earth, Agnes Smedley recounts a series of dreams.

Having terminated an initial analysis with a male analyst, Smedley began psychoanalysis with Elisabeth Naef in Berlin in 1923, in the midst of a disintegrating relationship and in the aftermath of what she described as a ‘nervous collapse’. Though he later embarked on his own psychoanalysis with Max Eitingon on her insistence, Smedley’s partner Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (known as Chatto) regarded psychoanalysis as a kind of superstition when she first began sessions with Naef. She relied on friends and small bits of income from writing on Indian and Chinese politics and the current situation in Weimar Germany to cover the fees. Naef encouraged Smedley to write the novel as a therapeutic exercise. 

The novel’s climax sees romantic and political heartbreak coincide. After years of eschewing conventional romantic love, the protagonist Marie falls for a man called Anand (a character based on Chatto), an Indian revolutionary she meets through her organising activities in solidarity with the Indian independence movement in New York. Although they share a disdain for the bourgeois institution of marriage and he’s aware that she’d had sexual relationships before they met, when Anand discovers that one of her former lovers is someone he knows in the movement he is overcome with jealousy and claims the revelation of this previous liaison would threaten his reputation. Reluctantly and painfully she parts from him. 

In the book’s afterword, Rosalind Delmar mentions that Smedley was haunted by a dream recounted in the novel, which she returned to again and again in her analysis. In the dream Marie contemplates a beautiful bowl covered in painted flowers, which cracks in her hand as she gazes at it:

I had not broken the bowl… nobody it had broken it… but it was broken, irrevocably broken by something I knew not what. Despair hung over me. I turned and awoke. It was very dark.

But another more hopeful dream, recounted a few pages later, struck me more forcefully when I read Daughter of Earth. It reminded me of a long dream that appears in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (another semi-autobiographical novel in which the protagonist has a psychological breakdown and commences psychoanalysis following an intense period of political engagement and the end of a politically-charged romantic relationship). Lessing writes: 

I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive. There were many subtle and fantastic colours, but the overall feeling this expanse of fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red. In my dream I handled and felt this material and wept with joy...  The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour, but a colour I have never seen in life. This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes - I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence. Beneath me was silence. The slowly turning world was slowly dissolving, disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through space, so that all around me were weightless fragments drifting about, bouncing into each other and drifting away. The world had gone, and there was chaos. I was alone in chaos. And very clear in my ear a small voice said: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved. I woke up, joyful and elated. 

I like to read this - wishfully, wistfully - as occupying a space somewhere between the revolutionary dream (as a consciously produced vision of a future society) and the kind of dream recalled upon waking that might appear with an accompanying interpretation in a psychoanalytic case history (which follows the threads of the dreamer’s associations to unpick its psychic significance). I have no interest in digging beneath this literary dream’s shimmering surface - if that would even be possible in the absence of a dreamer - I would rather just contemplate its images. Dreams dreamt by revolutionaries are not necessarily dreams of revolution and certainly don’t provide anything like political blueprints but maybe there is something about dreams like this, written in the kind of poetic register valued by theorists of revolutionary dreaming like Wang, Stites and Kelley, that could be read - wishfully, wistfully - as future-oriented, as signalling a desire for another world. Smedley writes:  

I dreamed:

I stood on the outer verge of the world. The earth lay back and below me. I was suspended in the air by my own weight. About me was the universe–deep blue, shot through with grey. Unchanging, never-ending. Before me, above me, below me, stretched nothing but this colour. This was Infinity, I thought.

Then I stood gazing slightly upward, and from the vastness teardrops were falling. They fell just before my face, a row of large, dark, grey drops, and by their side, a row of small rose-hued drops. I listened… they fell into nothingness below me, without a sound… there was nothing to make a sound. I neither heard them come nor go. How slowly and endlessly they fell! 

The large grey drops were tears of pain, I recalled with unquestioning finality, and the small rose-hued ones that came so slowly were tears of joy. 

Above me stretched Infinity, soundless, unbounded in immensity. A dim humming came… the dim, never-ceasing humming of the cosmic universe. The uncomprehending vastness of it filled my being.

I turned restlessly and awoke. Infinity hung over my spirit. 

A third dream follows in which she sees the face of death by a fireside, but I’ll end with this dream of tears and infinity and let the hum of the universe continue to reverberate.