ABSTRACT
Dreams and war diaries collected from Ukrainian students in the first two months of the war can be thought about as inhabiting a dreamscape of fear and desire. The expressiveness of these pieces of writing is very striking: how prescient they are, how they convey the turmoil, threat and reality of war, how much they evoke the emotional ‘harmonics’ of the situation. They overlap greatly in tone and content, even though the diaries are by their nature more geared to actual events. It makes some sense to treat the diaries as extended dreams, and the dreams as miniature diaries. In this chapter, I draw on psychoanalytic ideas developed in previous European conflicts to engage with some of the dreams and diaries to examine the work they do in creating narratives of anger, anxiety, resilience, justice and repair.
