ABSTRACT
In late 1939, shortly after Britain declared war on Germany, a 29-year-old mother and housewife from Portsmouth records that her dreams have become increasingly incoherent: ‘Try as I might, my dreams … just simply refuse to assume a coherent form. They are a senseless meaningless jumble.’1 As a member of the volunteer panel for the Mass-Observation project, this observer had been asked how her dreams had changed in response to the war. What is fascinating about the dreams she records is the tension between the seemingly incoherent and uncontrollable nature of her dreams and her ardent desire to find some kind of meaning in them. In striking ways, this Portsmouth housewife is typical of the many volunteer dream respondents, male and female, who are self-conscious and anxious about the meaningfulness of their dreams, not only for themselves but also for the purposes of the Mass-Observation project. Like many others, this dreamer provides small clues to the possible meanings of her dreams, tracing events and the people in her dreams back to the circumstances of her daily life. In ranging from a romantic encounter with the local chemist to a nightmarish air-raid scene in which ‘Hitler hovered over us as a menacing evil herald of our approaching doom’, the dreams of this respondent are ‘uncontrolled and inexplicable’, emanating out of a fantasy life that is both familiar and strange.2 In noting the bizarre temporal logic of the dream in which the expansive scenarios and seemingly interminable events of a typical dream often account for only a short period of real time during the state of sleep, this dreamer is both curious and perplexed by her dream life. Her observations reflect a characteristic self-awareness about the significance of dreams in spite of the seemingly ‘senseless’ nature of their meaning. Dream reports such as this also typify the Mass-Observation dream archive’s implacable obscurity, which by virtue of the nature of its subjective material and volume of data, refuses any unifying interpretive coherence. This prompts us to ask, what kind of knowledge of social and cultural life does a dream archive yield? In Archive Fever, Derrida observes that while the archive axiomatically
points to the past, it also signifies ‘the question of the coming of the future’. In suggesting that the archive prompts ‘the question of a response, of a promise
and a responsibility to the future’, Derrida frames the archive within a horizon of possibility.3 In this sense, archive fever is driven by an anxiety of loss; what cannot be known, what might be missing, what might have been destroyed, or perhaps even the impenetrability of what remains. The relationship between the possibilities of future knowledge that the archive promises and the concern about what is missing or what might be indecipherable forms its own peculiar form of anxiety in relation to an archive of dreams. The Mass-Observation dream archive induces a peculiar experience of plenitude and loss: the thrill of expectation in the face of the mass of collected data compels a desire for knowledge of an area of life that has been underrepresented in the archive, quickly thwarted by the recognition that what it contains resists assimilation, coherency and even meaning. If Freud made us aware of the complexity, obscurity and ambiguity of the dream itself, an archive of dreams prompts us to consider the role of dreams in fleshing out the intricate details of historical life. If the archive promises to deliver an objective, material trace of social and cultural life, what are we to make of an archive of dream reports and diaries, the anecdotal accounts of unconscious life? The minimal work that exists on the Mass-Observation dream archive points to the limitations of using dreams as sources of historical knowledge. As Tyrus Miller argues, the methodological and interpretive problems of the Mass-Observation dream archive stem from its ‘relative failure’ in yielding ‘new knowledge of the collective psychic life of the British populace’.4 As such the dream archive seems indelibly marked by an anxiety of failure over the meaningfulness of the material it has collected, not only for subsequent researchers trying to make sense of the logic driving the collection, but for the directors of Mass-Observation and perhaps many of the dream reporters themselves. And yet, as Carolyn Steedman suggests, the archive is, by its very nature, a repository of ‘that which will not go away’.5 If, for Steedman, the archive represents our lingering investment in a nineteenth-century longing for an objective, material world, the dream archive is evidence of this impossibility, serving also as a kind of literal evidence of the return of the repressed as the very condition of historical narrative. Following Derrida, Steedman notes that archive fever proper is not so much a feverish desire to enter the archive and make use of its contents, but simply to know that it is there, to have it as a kind of reassurance. In spite of the inherent opacity of the Mass-Observation dream archive, there is something reassuring about the peculiar optic it presents. The Mass-Observation archive is perhaps one of the most extraordinary
experiments in the history of archival collection, not least of all because it provides a detailed and expansive, self-reflexive portrait of mid-century Britons, engaged in everyday ordinary and not so ordinary rituals and events. The inclusion of dreams as part of this archival mapping of everyday life is significant because it suggests the newfound importance of dream life and subjective psychic life to the formal dimensions and contours of everyday experience. In this sense the dream assumes a powerful role in reshaping the formal limits of archival collection and knowledge as well as the emotional
and intimate dimensions of everyday life. In this chapter I want to move beyond the sense of ‘failure’ that has characterized the Mass-Observation dream archive, commonly defined by its attempts to yield new knowledge of the collective psychic life of mid-century Britons. Instead I want to examine some of the dreams and dreamers themselves as part of the relationship between the self-analytical possibilities opened up by the narration of dreams and a mass democratic movement that newly defines self-observation and selfculture within the terms of social transformation. The chapter asks, what does it mean to include dreams within the broader context of the MassObservation movement’s focus on everyday observation and reflection? Since dreams form a bridge between memory, experience and intimate emotional and psychic life, what does it mean for a Mass-Observation archive to collect accounts of the dream lives of its participants alongside other everyday rituals and experiences? By beginning with these seemingly straightforward questions, I want to shift the focus from the archive’s interpretive or methodological failure, or even its difficulty, to the movement’s experimental culture, demonstrated by its incorporation of dream life into the very texture of everyday, ordinary experience. This is to shift the focus from the formation of the collective dream life of ordinary Britons to the individual dreamers themselves who formed an important self-analytical collective community, and who were curious enough about Mass-Observation experiments, and about the possible significance of dreams, to narrate for public consumption, extraordinary and mundane details of their dream lives. If, as Steedman suggests, the archive represents ways of seeing and knowing, what kind of knowledge comes into view when we examine the Mass-Observation dream archive in this way? (p. 4) Irrespective of the failure over the collective meaning of the dream reports, or its methodological limitations, the creation of a dream archive under the auspices of a self-reflexive ethnographic movement is an event that in significant ways allows us to see what might have been missing all along from the archive proper. It restores to history the importance of dream life – that is, the desire to find in dreams a significance that extends our knowledge of individual psychic life. If, as Benjamin insisted, ‘Dreaming has a share in history’, dreams also extend the very limits of archival knowledge in ways that mirror the increasingly intimate focus on individual life within modernity alongside those various experimental movements that sought to promote new and enriched forms of collective experience.6
