Dreams After the Death of God — the Value of Night-Dreams in the Death Camp

Author suggests introduction to understanding the incredibility of the material which are dreams of
people who survived from Holocaust. The author poses two basic questions: why in camps the dreams
had a significant value and why relation with dream teller was worth giving up the last slice of bread when
a corpse was perceived through the prism of hunger.
Finding meaning of dreams in the concentration camp was like plea for myth, for hope and faith.
The absence of God and the tragedy of that no-win situation made those needs fundamental.
Dreams are both the creation of self and simultaneously they arise without intention. This foggy
status of dreaming gives us the opportunity to perceive it like an echo of transcendence, like visiting
something from the outside or even like a kind of religious revelation. Hence the tendency to interpret
dreams in a prophetical way (in the camp and in the colloquial thinking about dreams). Heartening
interpretation gave encouragement, a strip of impossible optimism.
Author also shows a dream symbol as a stimulus that triggers the human tendency two reflection and
hermeneutics used as a tool for getting meanings from oneself. Those inner meanings enabled a thing-like
human being, a prisoner of the death camp to reconstruct the ruins of taken-away identity.