Dreams

One of the most striking things I have observed about Helena Iara is that when she is asleep, her facial expressions seem much more mature an profound than when she is awake.  She laughed asleep before she laughed awake.  I see in her mouth irony, the expression Brazilians call "safado" (which in a child is something of the nautiness we might associate with Denis the Menace or Calvin), a kind of existential exhaustion, a thoughtful melancholy... As I mentioned many blogs ago, we can doubt whether these expressions "express" some kind of external emotion or in fact begin to constitute them, but the face is clearly engaged in something profound.  And here, more significantly, I want to think about what dreams these sleeping expressions might imply.

One afternoon this week, as colic kept Helena Iara from sleeping, I talked to her about one of the more obscure thinkers who've yet appeared on this blog, but also one of my favorites: the German-Chilean philosopher-economists (yes, lots of hyphens in an interesting hybrid) Franz Hinkelammert.  Hinkelammert also talks about dreams, though in their political form as utopia, and his thoughts may help to think about why babies "express" more profound emotions as they sleep.

Over the last twenty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become part of the conventional wisdom that utopian dreams lie at the base of totalitarianism.  The Nazis, the Russian Communists, Pol Pot and others wanted to "perfect" humanity, but the result was the extermination of anything that didn't fit (Jews, Kulaks, intellectuals, political opponents) and ruthless imposition of the will of the few over the many.  These ideas were first expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper fifty years ago, but have since become part of the "common sense" of politics.  Dreams are dangerous, they say. 

Hinkelammert's thought emerges in opposition to this anti-utopianism.  Utopia and dreams, he says, must be conceived of not as some reality for which we strive, but as criteria by which we can evaluate the present.  The worst conditions of oppression and misery can seem absolutely normal and inevitable: after a few generations of slavery, slaves may come to think that there is no other way to live in the world.  Medieval peasants came to expect that the lord would get the first night with their new wives.  People might not like their lives, but it seems that there is no other way.  

Walter Benjamin insisted on memory as a way to judge the present -- a better or more just past, memory of previous struggles -- but Hinkelammert sees these criteria in the future.  And more significantly, judging the present based on the future avoids the conservatism that Benjamin's ideas can inspire, the idea that all struggles are to regain the good of the past instead of to create something new.  When we dream of a utopia, Hinkelammert says, we win a way to see the present with new eyes: to say where it fails, and to think critically about ways to make the world better.  Not necessarily to construct that exact utopia, but to change what is wrong about this world.

The upshot of these ideas is that we need to live the future before we live the present.  And that brings us back to Helena and her sleeping expressions: could it be that dreams allow us to practice life, its emotions and experiences and judgments, before we live it?  That babies dream as a way to get a little critical distance on their world, and thus evaluate it?