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In Michael Haneke's remarkable film The White Ribbon a young girl, Erna (an echo of Irma, the suffering heroine of Freud's dream book?), anxiously recounts a dream: something terrible is about to happen to a child. She is afraid her dream may actually come true; but this possibility is gently dismissed by her hearer. Shortly after, a horrific assault does indeed take place. The investigating police, who have been told about Erna's dream and question her, have no time for this idea that dreams might foretell the future; in their eyes Erna's prior knowledge can only mean she is an accessory. Even we, the audience, are left uncertain on this score. Yet there have been enough tragic, ominous events in the film up to this point to fuel a hundred nightmares, and to suggest that further catastrophes are imminent.
Disbelief, scepticism and fear in the face of the dream are key themes in John Clare and Ali Zarbafi's exhilarating, disturbing book: we are frightened, perhaps, ‘of the enormity of what we may see’ (p. 177). At the same time, a premise of the book, as of Haneke's haunting film, is that we are all implicated. It is interesting to consider Social Dreaming alongside The White Ribbon in another respect too. Haneke has said that the film is about the origins of terrorism, and about the social, intergenerational and emotional conditions which gave rise to National Socialism. Part of the background to the contemporary social dreaming project in the UK is Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams (Beradt, 1966), a book of dreams collected in Germany in the 1930s which chillingly foretold the unspeakable horrors to come. That it is potential disaster we too are facing - whether through global warming, nuclear proliferation, Third World devastation or religious conflict - is a theme which underlies dreams recounted and associated to by the anonymous dreamers in the book; frequently it is hard for them to stay with what they dream. Yet the likelihood of catastrophe is inc