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Dreaming in Dark Times by Sharon Sliwinski is a short book that stimulates much thinking and reading and dreaming and, if all goes well, useful action. Like Jill Gentile's (2016) book, Feminine Law, it undertakes to connect and build “in the spaces” of major topics. For Gentile, those topics are free association and free speech. For Sliwinski they are dreaming and “dark times”. Both free association and dreaming are topics not originated, but greatly elaborated, by Sigmund Freud (1900). Gentile's discussion of free speech is largely based upon a review, aided by her co-author, Michael Macrone, of the first amendment to the US Constitution and subsequent case law.
Sliwinski's “dark times” is based upon the work of Hannah Arendt as derived from the Bertold Brecht poem “To Posterity”. Citing Arendt (1968), Sliwinski notes, “Dark times … do not just appear with totalitarian regimes. Rather, she [Arendt] marked these eras by a certain kind of suppression of speech and public declaration …. She noticed that human speech becomes divested of its power to represent and transmit the truth during these periods. A kind of perverse language emerges instead that tends to serve those who wish to prolong the distorted political situation” (p. xviii). Such a statement will grab the attention of anyone living in the United States in 2018.
Like free association and free speech, dreaming is a guarantor of freedom, even in dark times. Sliwinski's aim is clearly stated, “This book aims to show how dream life can serve to reanimate a world that has been flattened by dark times. Dreams are a crucial resource for regaining a measure of freedom in our thought and speech, serving as a vital landscape to recover our fundamental human capacity to assign meaning to the world” (p. xix).
Sliwinski's book has 28 pages of Notes (almost one-quarter the size of the actual text). Only the most intellectual reader will be familiar with all the scholarship found in these Notes. But that is where the “readin