Rêver sous le capitalisme (2017): Work dreams

Abstract

This article considers Sophie Bruneau's documentary Rêver sous le capitalisme (2017) as a significant and distinctive contribution to the field of social dreaming. It shows how Bruneau was inspired by Charlotte Beradt's foundational work The Third Reich of Dreams (1985) to collect and present a series of dreams about the contemporary experience of the neoliberal workplace. These dreams have a manifestly social content and exhibit recurrent themes, which means that they can be interpreted as a collective matrix that provides insight into the effect of work on the psyche. The dreams also have a latent content that provides access to a social unconscious. They register otherwise unarticulated and invisible dynamics, and in doing so they suggest new ways of thinking and resisting in what Hannah Arendt calls ‘dark times’. The article will also explore the ways in which Bruneau's striking use of cinematic composition adds an important aesthetic dimension to the field of social dreaming, constructing an allusive and resonant dreamscape within which affects of exhaustion, trauma and ultimately resistance can circulate.