After the Second World War , the impression of cruel war has been deeply rooted in the minds of people from all over the world. This article mainly studies the impact of the war scenes after the Second World War on the dreams of the people of Finland.
By studying dreams recorded by people in the 1980s and veteran survey records from 1999 to 2000, researchers analyzed how war nationalized the most private areas of life. The civilian dream of war is more symbolic than the soldiers' dream, which is characterized by a ruthless reenactment of traumatic experiences.
Long after the war ended, the dreams related to war had an impact on people's nightlife. However, the content and frequency of the dream of war changes over time, and sometimes repeated nightmares can become a temporary relief for people.
Sociologists Pete and Thomas (1966) define their perceptions of our daily lives with this elegant wording and knowledge of social construction on how to make this life justified. Historians are often interested in the “narrow light cone ” when studying past experiences, which represents various ways to observe and understand the world.
The nature of historical scholarship—and the resources we use as knowledge tools—focus on the ever-changing meanings in history and the process of understanding in a sober state in daily life; the darkness of the surrounding forests is no longer so attractive.
The most serious attempt to study darkness is in the field of psychological historiography, with the results sometimes original and innovative, but also extremely controversial. Sigmund Freud seems to have such a powerful and persistent impact on the analysis of dreams that this may warn historians—beware of the traps of psychological historiography—not to enter the field.
Therefore, this chapter has two purposes for historical research on dreams. First, I will show that the “penhain of our dreams” itself is a subject worth considering, and also to understand many aspects of the sober experiences and behaviors of people who have experienced large-scale violence.
This chapter does not clearly distinguish between day and night, but tries to move in the realms of dawn and dusk, where dreams and awake states are blurred from each other. Second, in doing so, I think it is useful to point out that dreams can also be studied without the burden of Freud's theory.
As I will prove, there are other ways to look at dreams besides finding unconscious desires and potential symbolism, although these explanations may be interesting. Furthermore, the third goal of this chapter is not limited to the dream itself, but is associated with the book’s broader theme, namely the study of the state as a personal experience.
I am studying the Finnish "war generation", that is, the dreams that the Finnish people who experienced war in early adulthood or late adolescence experienced were related to World War II experience. While the main part of my research material focuses on soldiers and veterans, I also associate these experiences with civilian experiences.
What I am interested in is the different contents of dreams and how dreams change. Most importantly, I think dreams are a way of studying the experiences of state intertwining with violence in the context of war and its consequences. How do war experiences within the national framework manifest themselves in dreams? What is the meaning of "country" in the dream of war?
What does this tell us about a country's experience in war? Is it possible to identify a specific dream culture shaped and created by war? Although the above issues involve major issues such as war, nationality and culture, I explore them from the perspective of individual soldiers and civilians and their dream experiences related to war.
In nationalism research, social anthropologist Anthony uses the concept of nationalism to analyze how modern Scots use nations to express themselves and form personal identities. I have studied a similar phenomenon in the frontline poetry of Finnish soldiers during World War II, when soldiers can be regarded as "nationalist craftsmen" when they use the state to give meaning to their war experiences.
Regarding the attention to individuals, you can find similarities to this chapter in the above works; but the influence directions are very different. Rather than treating the dream subjects of this chapter as active agents of nationalism, I would rather show how nations invade their nightlife with violence without invitation.
historian Reinhart Koselek discussed a series of extraordinary dreams collected by the Third Reich journalist Charlotte Blatter from 1933 to 1939, and put forward an important point of view that these dreams are not only witnesses of horror, but also an important part of the horror itself.
Hitler's totalitarian regime occupied the private nightlife of his subjects, haunting the dream with weird real-life events and hallucinations of persecution. From this we can conclude that not only have a specific dream culture, but also dreams prominent in a specific historical context may actually have a considerable impact on people's daily lives and the entire culture. This is especially true when a large part of the population or the entire population has experienced a war, political terror or some other collective disaster. Literary scholar Paborno studied dreams similar to those collected by Borat: the Soviet dream of the Stalin era. According to Paborno, dreams provide a way to look at a person’s living conditions and emotional problems.
What a person knows and feels without fully realizing it. Dreams often focus on fears and expectations of a person’s future, so they provide material well suited to study the experience of political terror that forces a person to foresee persecution and increasing control over private affairs.
Dream also emphasizes the persistence of stress and fear long after the actual violence ended: the nightmare associated with the great terror did not end with Stalin's death in 1953, but continued for decades thereafter. Although such a war experience is not the same as living under repressive totalitarianism, the direct threat of violence, lack of personal freedom and uncertainty about the future are indeed characteristic of both experiences.
Studying the experience of war from the same perspective Paborno took to Stalinist dreams seems fruitful: how people deal with situations where the stress is the greatest and the existence threat is the greatest, and how the night memory of such experiences can firmly grasp people.
Combined, Burke, Kosselek and Papuno’s comments encourage historical research on dreams in the dynamic relationship between personal experiences, surrounding cultures, and different dream content. I will explore this triangle through corpus from two sources. First is the collection of the Finnish Literary Association Archives (FLSA), the most important archive of folklore, memory and oral history in Finland.
A specific collection stands out here: a 1989 Dream Survey organized by folklorist Anne Guy. Like FLSA material, the collection is based on public appeals or phone calls distributed through newspapers and through FLSA’s respondent networks. The series contains first-hand dream accounts from 104 respondents: a total of 342 pages of information.
This call is not specifically directed at war-related dreams. In the first sentence of the phone, Kavala asks people to say “how they explain” their dreams, and then this main interest is a question about the personal meaning of the dream, whether the respondent shares his or her dreams with others, and further refinement of these questions.
But with the call in the late 1980s it received numerous war-related responses—at that time, the war generation in Finland was still active in public life, the late 1980s and 1990s were usually the memory boom of that era about World War II. In addition, I have collected the dream memories related to war from other FLSA collections. They do not form a systematic corpus, but they help complement and alter other sources.
My second source corpus is different in nature and contains only dreams that are directly related to war. In 1999-2000, the Advisory Committee on Veterans Affairs in Northern Finland organized a “War to Peace” survey to collect information and memories about veterans’ experiences, challenges and problems.They transitioned from military service to civilian life in 1944 and after.
This investigation is distributed to men and women who served on the frontline or war zone during World War II. The 17-page long table contains 123 questions. One of them (9.3.) is related to dreams: "Did war accompany your dreams? What kind of war dreams have you seen and how long did it last?" The space to answer questions is limited to a little more than three lines on the table.
As part of such a long survey, respondents do not tend to spend too much time on any one issue. However, the size and scope of the data make up for the simplicity of the answer: the survey received a total of 1058 responses, of which 882 were from men and 176 were from women.
Some women answer questions on behalf of their old couples, if the latter is weak and unable to do the job alone. Almost all the answers come from Lapland and Oulu in northern Finland. However, the size and scope of the data make up for the simplicity of the answer: the survey received a total of 1058 responses, of which 882 were from men and 176 were from women.
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