Dreams help us emotionally process the day’s challenges, reduce the intensity of distressing memories, and strengthen resilience. By getting enough quality sleep, tuning habits like pre-sleep reflection or sensory cues (scents or sounds), and using tools like memory reactivation or dream journaling, we can boost these cognitive benefits (The Guardian, 2025).

This academic paper proposes that wartime dream diaries become testimonial acts, offering visibility to experiences of violence and trauma that society often silences. Through sharing dreams, individuals engage in both self-disclosure and political memory, making dreams themselves a form of witnessing and relational ethics in times of war (Humanities, 2025).

This paper explores how dreams and visions shape the way people understand and construct their worlds. Anthropologist Katherine Swancutt examines how different cultures view dreaming as more than just a personal experience—it can be a way of gaining knowledge, making decisions, and shaping social structures (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2024).

This essay revisits Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, a clandestine archive of 300 dreams gathered in 1930s Berlin that reveal how authoritarianism penetrated the unconscious. By treating dreams as a collective diary of fear, complicity, and occasional resistance, the article argues that Beradt’s work remains a vital, overlooked lens on the psychic life of totalitarian rule (The New Yorker, 2019).

The book explores how Americans—soldiers, civilians, enslaved and free—lived not only amid the open horrors of the Civil War but also in the private realms of sleeplessness, dreams, and fears. It shows that dreams served many roles: they echoed anxieties, prophesied death, offered escape, maintained bonds across distance, and helped people make sense of war’s disruption (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).