Why a dream-within-a-dream? Why is a simple dream not enough? Does the duplication reflect duplicity? Is the dreamer hiding behind two screens? What makes the double screen useful?
A dream-within-a-dream is reported by Primo Levi (2015) in his memoir of life after Auschwitz during a long, painful journey back home to Italy after liberation. The journey back was complicated by his Italian citizenship since Italy, in partnership with Nazi Germany, had lost the war. Stranded in Poland, starved, often freezing, sometimes gravely ill, lonely for his home and family, he had lived a second nightmare after the liberation. Hated by the Germans for being a Jew, he was now hated by Poles for being Italian.
On his first night back home, he dreamt a dream that he had many times after that. He writes:
It's a dream within another dream, varying in its details, unique in its substance. I am at the table with my family, or friends, or at work, or in a verdant countryside—in a serene, relaxed setting, in other words, apparently without tension and pain—and yet I feel a subtle, profound anguish, the definite sensation of a looming threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, little by little, or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and is destroyed around me, the scene, the walls, the people, and the anguish becomes more intense, and more precise. Everything now has turned into chaos; I am alone at the center of a grey and murky void, and, yes, I know what this means, and I also know that I have always known it. I am again in the Lager and nothing outside the Lager was true. The rest was a brief holiday, or a trick of the senses, a dream: the family, nature in flower, the house. Now this internal dream, the dream of peace is over, and in the external dream, which continues coldly, I hear the sound of a well known voice: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn
Page 126command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up “Wstawać.” (p. 397–398).
The experience of fear so profound that it is etched in his mind, in his brain, remains with him for life. The contrasting experience of the peaceful inner dream cannot erase it. The trauma of the camp, extended into the trauma of the post camp exile blots out the life he led before and after the traumas. He wakes into fear even as he returns to a peaceful life at home.
In an account of dreams and dreaming from prehistoric times to the present day Sidarta Ribeirra (2021) cites neurological research showing that Freud's understanding of dreams has been confirmed in two important respects: (1) dreams regularly use experiences of the day before the dream as part of the dream narrative; (2) dreams are built on desire, or what Freud called “wish.” In addition dreams have been shown to use the past to predict and control future action. By converting present day experience into a network of past memories, they convert short term memories into long term components of the memory system in the brain.
Yesterday I was driving up a quiet street in a small town, following a large truck. Suddenly the truck overturned a tall metal pole close to the curb. As I passed the pole, it seemed to be coming down on the roof of my car. I saw that I could not go faster because the truck was in front of me. There was nothing I could do to avoid an accident. I was helpless. At that moment time seemed to go slower. I saw a vivid image of the engine cover flapping up to completely obscure my windshield. But my image came from a time over fifty years earlier when I had the engine cover of the car I was then driving sixty miles an hour open on a highway in Virginia. I had taken my foot off the gas, but did not turn or brake so that I came to a slow and safe stop. That time I had made my peace with the idea that I could die then and there. As I came to a stop, I appreciated the good life I had until then. The pole fell inches behind my back bumper.
Afterward, it seemed to me that the image of the blind wind-shield was a defense. It was telling me that I had gotten through worse,
Page 127that I could make it through now. I thought of a paper by Ernest Kafka about examination dreams and his interpretation that such dreams were a defense against current fears that worked by reminding the dreamer that she had passed such examinations in the past.
Does such an understanding of dreams as reassurance fit with Freud's original idea that all dreams are wish fulfillments? I think that it is a wish for safety that such dreams are depicting. This fits with the idea that nightmares are also wish fulfillments. When one wakes up after a nightmare, there is a sense of relief that the horror either did not happen, or is in the past. The conscious manipulation of recurrent nightmare dreams that some therapists recommend serves to reinforce the idea that nothing so bad will happen in the present or the future (NPR).
If dramatic dreams are failures to master previous drama, having a dream-within-a-dream is a good way to add an extra layer of reassurance to the dreamer. If it is only a dream and the dreamer realizes this even in her sleep, the dream about a trauma is not necessarily traumatic in itself. It becomes benign by being doubly sequestered from waking rationality.