"Dreambook for existing otherwise" : anticolonial histories of sleep

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Proctor, Hannah and Ty, M. (2025) "Dreambook for existing otherwise" : anticolonial histories of sleep. Radical History Review (154). (In Press)

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Abstract

Is it possible to dream together? This essay assembles an archive of collective dreaming that includes the art installation Black Power Naps (2015); Harriet Tubman’s neuroatypical visions of freedom that took hold during involuntary bouts of sleep; the ethnologist Charles Seligman’s dictionary of dream symbols, which he extracted from colonial India; and Mohammad Malas’s 1987 film The Dream, which documentsing the dreams of Palestinians living in refugee camps. Against a Jungian conception of the collective unconscious that roots itself in a racist vision of prehistory, we the essay looks toward dreams as they are interwoven with shared endeavors to disrupt the inevitability of white supremacy. While colonial historiography tendentiously minimizes the significance of sleep and dreaming, evicting them from the sphere of political rationality into the fringes of the private individual, we the essay considers how these oblique frequencies of experience help to metabolize common struggles and disarticulate linear conceptions of time that conventionally orient History and the metaphysics of race.

ORCID iDs

Proctor, Hannah ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7186-5720 and Ty, M.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)