NP but Somehow Pynchonian to me. Dreams in the Third Reich.

[Mark Thibodeau]

Fascism's ongoing rise has certainly had an effect on my own dreams
and nightmares, that's for sure.

I find that my "dream self" is less certain of pretty much everyone he
encounters in dreams, be they friend, family, or composite. I have
more difficulty trusting these dream people, and they seem less
capable of being reasoned with. I've had many dreams of people
harboring hidden agendas and feeling more free to share their
"politically incorrect" (i.e. fascist) opinions about, say, people of
a different race, or people with a different set of political beliefs.

I feel as though a big part of the New Fascist International(e)
"project" has been the inoculation of the minds that they've targeted
for takeover against facts, reason, truth, evidence, crushingly
overwhelming expert consensus, etc, etc, etc... they just DO NOT CARE
that they're wrong. It's an infantile regression, one that could only
ever have happened in a society where the stakes have been made to
seem not all that important (again, purely an illusion).

I don't know. I'm rambling now. All this to say that, YES, the current
crisis has personally affected me, right down to my dreams. Not really
sure where I stand anymore.

Cheers;
Yer Old Pal Jerky
(YOPJ)

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 6:31 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
> "Yes, sort of GERMAN, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is
> even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects,
> Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian if the
> Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central
> rocket works is located."
>
> Gravity's Rainbow, p. 240
>
> Inspired by Beradt's book, the historian Reinhart Koselleck had a
> research program running on human experiences of time in times of terror
> & the methodological consequences for history science. Koselleck wasn't
> able to finish the overall project but there's an essay from the 1970s
> where his basic considerations can be found:
>
> Reinhart Koselleck: Terror und Traum. Methodologische Anmerkungen zu
> Zeiterfahrungen im Dritten Reich. Pp. 278-299 in R.K.: Vergangene
> Zukunft. Zur Semantik historischer Zeiten. Frankfurt a.M. 1979: Suhrkamp.
>
> The essay collection - "Future's Past: On the Semantics of Historical
> Time"  (NY 2004: Columbia University Press) - is available in English.
> Here comes the pdf:
>
> https://www.academia.edu/33539151/Futures_Past_On_the_Semantics_of_Historical_Time_-_Reinhart_Koselleck_2014_1985_
>
> The essay "Terror and Dream. Methodological remarks on the experience of
> Time during the Third Reich" can be found on pages 205-221.
>
> "Traumdarstellungen aus den Konzentrationslagern eröffnen uns einen
> Bereich, wo der menschliche Verstand zu versagen scheint, wo seine
> Sprache verstummt. Die konzentrationären Träume zeichnen sich durch
> einen rapiden Verlust an Wirklichkeit aus, während Wachträume
> proportional dazu zunehmen. Damit werden wir in einen Bereich gestoßen,
> in dem offenbar die schriftsprachliche Quellenlage unzureichend wird, um
> überhaupt begreifen zu lernen, was der Fall war. Wir werden auf die
> Metaphorik der Träume verwiesen, um sehen zu lernen, was wirklich geschah."
>
> (pp. 288-289, here quoted after the fourth paperback edition from the
> year 2000)
>
>
> Am 08.11.19 um 08:06 schrieb Mark Kohut:
> > https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1192490281687568384?s=20
> > --
> > Pynchon-L:https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> > .
> >
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l