Walter Benjamin: Dreams

Though published during his lifetime, Walter Benjamins dream notes and theoretical reflections on dreams are collected here for the first time in a single volume. Dreams highlights a dimension of Benjamins thinking that was invaluable for his writing and thought but which has thus far received little attention. The first section, Dream Notes, is a comprehensive and chronological collection of Benjamins transcriptions of his own dreams and includes unpublished manuscript materials. The second section, On Perception of Dreams. Awakening and Dream, features his theoretical reflections on dreams, ranging from short aphorisms and longer analyses of dream literature and the history of dreams to the political conception of a dreaming collective and its awakening. Editor Burkhardt Lindner describes Benjamins literary approach to his own dreams in the epilogue and gives a sketch of Benjamins own definition of the dream sphere, independent of and in contrast to Surrealism and Freuds interpretation of dreams. This pocketsize reader presents Benjamin as both a great dreamer and an important theorist of dreams. Die deutsche Originalausgabe erschien 2008 bei Suhrkamp.