Maelstrom: Inner Life against Authoritarianism
I. False Start
One July evening in the early nineteenth century, three Norwegian fishermen, brothers who often trawled risky but rewarding waters, sailed for their habitual fishing grounds. They were familiar with the timing of the tides off the coast where they fished and the phenomenon these tides brought about: a churning whirlpool that opened up every few hours, pulling boats, flotsam, and even trees into its grasp. Although they had avoided the whirlpool safely many times, on this day they were overtaken by a storm greater than any in living memory, which made it impossible to steer back to shore and instead pushed them into the maelstrom.
The first brother died when the storm winds ripped off the main mast, to which he had lashed himself for safety. The other two held fast to the deck of the boat. Eventually, the moon appeared through the clouds as the storm broke up overhead, making a rainbow in the mist and illuminating the beauty and horror of the brothers' predicament. Now they could see the glassy onyx funnel they circled as it reached down to the ocean floor. There, the second brother eventually met his fate, grasping a ring-bolt on the deck and going down with the ship. But before the ship was crushed, the third brother, who had entered a detached (or delirious) state of mind, noticed something important: large objects in the maelstrom were being pulled to the bottom quickly, but smaller objects fell more slowly. Those that seemed to fall the slowest were barrels and casks, just like the water cask he happened to be holding. This brother, although he failed to convince his sibling of the likeliest way to safety, survived by lashing himself to the cask and jumping overboard. In time, he found himself floating on the surface as the whirlpool slackened and gradually disappeared.
You may have noticed that this story is not true. Perhaps its fairy-tale-like plot with the three brothers or the moon rainbow tipped you off. Or you may have simply recognized it as Edgar Allen Poe's 1841 short story "A Descent into the Maelstrom." And while it is true that such a Norwegian whirlpool does exist—the Moskstraumen off of the Lofoden peninsula—it is not a deep, smooth funnel like a draining bathtub. Rather, it is a strong churn closer to the literal meaning of the Dutch word >maelstrom: "grinding steam." This whirlpool, unlike most in nature, occurs in the open ocean instead of narrow straits. And so, the size and type of vessels that could be pulled into it, greatly exaggerated by early travel accounts, must have intrigued Poe. The idea of such a maelstrom, the image of it, does not easily leave our minds even if we know, as Poe likely did, that it is not real.
Such images, as symbols of human struggle or suffering, appear in our minds at times of tragedy or disaster, when we realize that things will never be the same. Only hyperbolic images express what our inner lives feel like. In this way, the image of Poe's maelstrom, especially from the Harry Clarke edition that I bought as a teenager, came to my mind in the middle of one night in late 2025. I quickly understood its meaning: as the United States moves further into authoritarianism, we are inside the maelstrom of political and economic destabilization. Time and tide brought us here. It was not inevitable, but the forces that led to this place were larger than any one person could control, longer than any one lifetime could influence. And now that we are inside the vortex, it is up to each of us to decide what we will do.
The night during which the image of the maelstrom visited me was not long after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. My fears caused by that event were pragmatic: any society in which political violence is normalized can expect to see more of it. Like most, I don't want to live in a place where people are regularly killed, imprisoned, or disappeared for political reasons. As I saw the right beatify Kirk, and the mileage they got from his death, I could not understand why some folks on the left saw this as something well done, an unqualified good.
Two things are true at once: that the authoritarian establishment has used the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an excuse to vilify and punish its political enemies. And that, while many people on the left disapproved of the of the assassination, there were others who expressed delight. I found myself frustrated both that Kirk's death was used to prop up the right's unfounded claims of soaring leftist violence and that there were folks on the left who failed to see what a moral and strategic fuck up this was. It's the same frustration I have with memes some of my friends share about guillotining the rich. In a stunning example of literally not learning anything from history, they seem to forget that the ones who call for the guillotine most loudly often end up being fed to it.
I don't pass judgment on anyone's personal feelings and immediate reactions to the assassination. Kirk's rhetoric, especially about trans people, was damaging and dangerous. The people he demonized get to feel whatever they want. But the conversations in which people celebrated the assassination as if it were part of a viable political strategy started to worry me. I'm not actually worried about a violent leftist revolution, but I am worried about the goals of the left being compromised because we alienate those who would otherwise be supportive.
I've long been frustrated people who claim the moral high ground of tolerance and care for all...except for people they disagree with. This was the disconnect I was trying to process when the brother from "A Descent into the Maelstrom" jumped overboard in my mind. While the image appeared suddenly, I have spent a long time trying to explain it to myself by writing this. It is my testament to myself of what this moment in history feels like, my dialogue with myself about my place in it.
But I am not just talking to myself, though. The people that I am speaking to most directly are those who have a choice about whether to ignore, collude with, or resist the authoritarian present (note 1). To put it more plainly, white US citizens, especially those who are—or who can pass as—Christian, heterosexual, cisgender and non-disabled; people who are mostly able to opt out of being oppressed. The moral challenge for people in this category, in which I include myself, is different than for others who are direct targets of the regime.
At first I understood the fishing boat and ring bolt to represent the feeling of safety granted by political institutions and ideological systems. Some of the safety is physical, but much of it is psychological and emotional. Just like any political orientation, people on the left have a tendency to believe that our political ideology or party affiliation confers righteousness upon us, and with righteousness, the security of being Good People. (More on this below.) The narrative is that we, the left, are the champions of equality, true justice, and human dignity. That we are always on the right side of history, always making progress toward a more perfect society. That our goodness inheres in our desire to lift up the underclass, protect the marginalized, and champion the self-determination of the dispossessed.
I've played it up a little bit, but this is the ring bolt that people on the left grab when times get tough. Yet we know that our institutions struggle with the very things we fight against: bias and discrimination, corruption and base self-preservation, assault and abuse. Human weaknesses inhere in any human institution, yet many of us seem to think that following the correct institutions will keep us morally pure. This is why the left in particular is prone to purity politics and infighting—faith in the goodness of the ideology itself undergirds so much leftist belief. (note 2)
History holds a lot of beautiful leftist moments; it also holds many gory lessons for those who want to look. Some of the worst things that can be done to human beings have been done by leftists in the name of uplifting oppressed people and ridding the world of reactionaries. So when I see people who, for instance, oppose the death penalty but celebrate the assassination of their political enemies, I see people whose allegiance lies with ideology and who do not, or have chosen not to, live according to values. Both the death penalty and assassination have the same belief behind them: that a person or group of people is a problem to which death is the solution.
Saying that these actions share the same belief does not mean that they are equivalent. The power required to enforce a system of state execution is far greater than the power required to assassinate a single person, and is concentrated in far fewer hands. But both grow from the same root of deciding that death is the best answer to conflict.
By contrast, living by values means going beyond choosing a side: finding what is most important and holding to that even when it is inconvenient. Living from values is uncomfortable because what is right is not always apparent and requires assessing your stance based on new experiences and information. Sometimes what seems right ends up being self-serving.
And here I paused.
I don't disagree with any of the above, and yet I struggled writing my little essay. The harder I tried to bring these thoughts into a succinct form, the more dissatisfied I became. What I thought would take two or three weeks to write instead stretched into months of work. Part of this is normal: writing forces us to complicate ideas as we articulate them to ourselves. I also doubted that I had the moral authority to tell others what to do.
But beyond that, writing this essay started to feel both painful and inescapable. As I continued to return to it, sitting at my typewriter during the day and seeing maelstrom in my mind's eye at night, I finally understood: that a maelstrom had opened up inside of me.
II. Arc
The shape of Poe's maelstrom is a spiral—or more precisely, its 3-dimensional counterpart, the helix. It is an apt image for thinking about drastic political changes, as spirals often hold promise. Although I am not a Marxist, I can see why they have placed their hope in the dialectic: the idea that though the constant resolution of opposite ideas, we will be drawn forever upward into a society of greater perfection, like the expansion of spiraling galaxies. Likewise, the work of anti-nuclear activist Joanna Macy, which I studied for a while, is also based in the movement of the spiral to bring activists through their feelings and into knowledge and action over and over.
But I first started to pay attention to the promise of the spiral/helix, not in political theory, but in Romantic poetry. Years ago, as I was entering into graduate studies in literature, I read M.H. Abram's 1965 essay, "Style and Structure in the Greater Romantic Lyric." (note 3) In it, Abrams identifies—or invents—a micro-genre of British poetry written between the 1790s and 1820s by just four poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Each Greater Romantic Lyric, according to Abrams, follows a particular pattern. The poet begins his mediation by viewing a scene or landscape with a limited understanding of it or himself. Then he takes a journey through thought or memory in which he gains a spiritual realization. The poem ends with his return to the place he started, but above it, spiritually and intellectually elevated.
Neither Abrams nor the poets themselves discuss these poems in terms of helices or spirals—a fact that surprised me when I re-read the essay recently, given how strongly that image impressed itself on my mind when I first read it. But Abrams cites Coleridge, perhaps the most systematic theorist of poetics among the four, who wrote that "The common end of all narrative, nay of all Poems, is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a straight line assume to our Understanding a circular motion—the snake with the tail in its mouth."
Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight" is one of Abrams' strongest examples of the Greater Romantic Lyric. It begins with the speaker sitting at a quiet fireside on a winter night, his child sleeping in a cradle next to him. It is a night "so calm, that it disturbs | And vexes meditation with its strange | And extreme silentness." In this disturbing silence, the speaker's mind wanders back to his own dismal school days, then forward to a projection of his son's brighter future, since he is raising the child in the countryside in contrast with his own childhood, "reared | In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim." He imagines his son one day appreciating a quiet winter night, just as he is doing now. The poem, having gone back into the speaker's childhood and forward into his child's adulthood comes to rest in a quiet, hopeful echo of the present.
For Coleridge, understanding oneself and the world is a recursive, not linear process. We arrive at deeper knowledge, not by moving forward, but by coming back to the same place over and over. Perhaps the poet is not literally higher off the ground than where he started, but it almost feels that way, as if he hovers above his present self—or the future life of his son. Liberated from chronological series of events and progressions of order, contemplation moves outward and home again.
But Abrams' construction of this genre neglects an important dimension of this movement: if freedom to move beyond the linear plane means we can return to the same place in a more elevated way, it also means that we can return to the same place, but lower. We tend to have other names for this: the whirlpool, the vortex, the maelstrom; circling the drain. And if we say that someone is beyond the reach of help or reason, we say that they are spiraling.
"Frost at Midnight" preserve's a father's memories and hopes outside the life of the historical individual Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But in real life, the spiral took a different direction than Coleridge anticipated. The poem was inspired by his oldest son, Hartley, who was a toddler when it was composed. The elder Coleridge could not have known at the time what would happen to Hartley, but we do: that he died younger than his father, a poet who wrote fewer poems than his father, his life marred and shortened by alcohol as his father's was by opium. The last decade of Hartley's life was a downward spiral he called "the woeful impotence of weak resolve." This circular or spiraling principle that Samuel Taylor Coleridge found so important is morally neutral, neither inherently bad nor good. In "Frost at Midnight," the spiral of thought brings comfort in its hopes for the future, which what makes it a lovely poem. But the snake with the tail in its mouth, we know, can just as easily take a turn for the monstrous. (note 4)
My spiral—our spiral—in which we are now caught, and which involves many people with their own inner spirals, is a poetics of dizziness. But interior destabilization is one of the purposes of creative imagination. Can we use it to our benefit?
❡
Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams is an analysis of almost 300 dreams that she collected from other people during the first years of the Nazi regime, 1933-38. She wrote these dreams in code, hid them inside the spines of Nazi-approved books, and smuggled them one by one out of Germany. In 1939, she was able to escape to the United States and in 1966 published a book-length treatment of them. In 2025, they were re-translated and republished just in time for a new audience trying to understand how a nation could willingly walk into the maw of authoritarianism. (note 5)
Beradt asked people in her daily life about their dreams without giving away her intention to record them for a later time. As Beradt was a Jew, she writes, "I didn't have much access to enthusiastic supporters of the regime or people benefiting from it." (p. 7). Her book is instead full of dreams of people who were put in conflicted or victimized positions: people in targeted groups, or who could be perceived as part of targeted groups, such as non-Jews with dark hair or large noses. She also talked to a number of people who opposed the party but occupied places in society where they would be rewarded for their cooperation with it. "What we have in these dreams, then, is an unreal reality against the backdrop of a distorted, distorting environment and disintegrating values." (p. 12). The images that came to these dreamers were counter-distortions reflecting the truth hidden underneath the Nazi party's distortions of waking life.
Beradt understood the importance of the dreams and hid them so assiduously because she knew they could result in prosecution. An epigraph for the first chapter of the book is from Nazi party member Robert Ley, who said, "The only private individuals left in Germany are people sleeping." Beradt knew that the Nazis were in fact wanting to hold sway even over people's dream lives. These dreams show how deeply the regime penetrated those living under it, but also the potential of inner images to influence reality.
Accordingly, Beradt is not interested in dreams of pure terror in which people were tortured, maimed, or killed. Instead, the dreams that she features are those of people whose consciousness had been bifurcated by the overwhelming pressures of the regime's politics and propaganda. That is, people who were opposed to the Nazis but were exhausted by the mental effort of doing so and feared the consequences of resistance. In these dreams, people find themselves humiliated as they make a Nazi salute, or cite Nazi rules when begging authorities to spare them, or collapse with shame at their pride and happiness in being praised by Hitler and other high-ranking officials. In some dreams, people start out by opposing the regime, but then change their minds and start singing along with Nazi songs or collecting money for the party.
Why did "good Germans" allow the Nazi regime to not only undertake atrocities against others, but to severely restrict their own freedoms? The dreams that Beradt recorded can at least partly answer that question. People were so worn down with propaganda that resisting it was like walking into a hard wind all the time. It was past the endurance of most people—who were just ordinary people, after all—to keep resisting year in and year out, to laugh at the slogans, to ignore the speeches coming out of every loudspeaker and radio, to endure the pointed inquires of their neighbors. Setting aside the enormous risk of even small acts of resistance, mentally resisting Nazi propaganda was like living in a factory where the sound of machinery drowns out thought and conversation.
In a passage the sums this up most succinctly, Beradt writes:
...these dreams show how people who at first thought the whole production [of the Nazi party] was ridiculous...who then had no choice but to watch the whole tragic drama of the Third Reich to the end, and who today [in the 1960s] totally reject it again, with perfect sincerity, can have been the same people all along.
One man managed a dream that captures in a single sentence how undramatic and imperceptible such a transition from suggestion to autosuggestion can be:
"I dreamed I said, 'I don't have to always say no anymore.'"
This fairy-tale formulation "don't have to anymore"—almost touching amid all the totalitarian versions of "you do have to"—show yet again what a "struggle" it is to be "opposed": Freedom is a burden, unfreedom comes as a relief. (p. 97)
This is not a defense of good Germans, only an acknowledgement that they were living inside an overwhelming propaganda machine—one greater even than our own, despite the much broader reach of disinformation and surveillance today. Beradt isolates the moment when the unnamed man's subconscious transmutes the outward commands and strictures of the Nazis into a language that he finds pleasing. We do not know what he made of this dream when he awoke, but he had a choice to either follow this path of least resistance or take it as a warning of his own capitulation. Ordinary people succumbed when they could not summon the extraordinary amount of energy and resolve to resist. Dreams like this are are a lesson, and since most of us are ordinary, we must guard ourselves carefully. When those in power apply words like "terrorist" to an unarmed person shot down by police, how many times will you hear it before it's easier to believe that the person really was a terrorist? Ten, fifty, one-thousand, ten-thousand times? They have the technological capability to repeat it millions of times. How long can you hold out?
For many Americans—usually those with the most privilege—just hearing it once is enough. It is a psychologically self-protective justification we give for our indifference to others' suffering, to believe that our choices keep us safe from the calamity that visits another. If I do not smoke, I can judge people dying of lung cancer—I don't need to feel sad or afraid because I am confident the same thing will not happen to me. If I do not break rules, or speak my mind, or hold a suspicious-looking object, or look at someone the wrong way, or stand in the wrong place, then I am not a terrorist. That person was gunned down because of a choice they made. They deserved what they got but I am safe because I am not like them.
Only too late do people find out, as the good Germans did, that believing so will not save one from the same fate.
Self-protective thinking may keep us from questioning the status quo, while the unsettling language of dreams helps us assess how things really are. The dreams Beradt recorded, although often disturbing, usually looked different from the dreamers' realities in waking life. Night is where one's conscience starts probing its own limits, sometimes demanding answers for the slightest capitulations during the daytime, but also sometimes experimenting with the pleasures of obedience and conformity. Whether we are dreaming or just lying awake in the dark, the inner maelstrom is a place inside of us where everything comes into question. This turn of mind is what ultimately allowed the third brother to escape the literal maelstrom he had fallen into:
I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious -- for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below.
The morbid game of speculating about his own demise is ultimately what saved him from it. The maelstrom is where we see by a different light than daylight; even the moon casts a rainbow. Here we may detach from habitual ways of thinking and in our delirium of calamity, what Beradt calls "unreal reality," understand our predicament.
The maelstrom of inner reckoning, which opens up against our will, may be disturbing but we should work to defend it. There is value in keeping a space inside of ourselves where the cognitive dissonance caused by authoritarianism cannot be resolved. For myself, I find that I am examining my personal morality more closely than I have before. The maelstrom has demanded the never-perfect, never finished work of becoming, not a Good Person, but a whole person.
III. Return
I am past 40 now and there is no going back. The inner work of middle age, I am finding, is letting go of accretions: pulling my stowaway beliefs out into the sunlight to see what they really are. Where have they come from? Are they are useful? This is taking responsibility for how my thoughts have shaped my life.
And so: a long time ago, although exactly when I cannot remember, a specter arose and threaded its long fingers through my heart: the Good Person. With it, the Bad Person also arose, the specter without which the Good Person cannot exist. In the white, Christian American society I grew up in, being a Good Person gives you access to the Kingdom of Heaven and one of its greatest privileges: deciding who the Bad people are. I eventually left Christianity as a teenager in part because I could sense that people in my congregation often hid parts of themselves in order to be seen as Good. I knew this because many times I bent to that pressure myself. But still, the desire to be Good silently mutated into a fear of being Bad, and although I left religion these specters came along.
When I began developing a political consciousness in my late teens and early 20s, I set out to be a Good Person whose politics are perfect, which for me meant never harming others, even in ignorance. At the time, this seemed obtainable as long as I learned to remember how to never do anything that hurt anyone. I didn't yet know that there are an infinite number of ways to harm and be harmed, and that, since harm often operates by vast, impersonal mechanics, sometimes the best I can do is choose who to harm. Knowing that I can't avoid harming others never makes it feel normal or just. The truth that life is a web of harms does not reduce their pains or injustices for a moment. This is an idea that my childhood idea Goodness can cannot contain.
As I got further into adulthood, it occurred to me that I might be wasting time trying to become Good and avoid being Bad, and further, that it may be impossible to be either. For how can I be a Good Person? By that, I don't mean a person who tries to be kind and caring; I mean a person who is blameless. Good people are perfect victims, honorable heroes, innocent rabble. They cannot be held accountable for the harm they do because they lack the agency to do anything bad. The Bad Person, by contrast is the opposite: terrorist, freeloader, thug, scum. Bad People can only be held accountable for the harm they do; it is not permissible that they could do Good. Right now, even suggesting that Good people should feel empathy or compassion for Bad people is offensive to many.
Although at times I intuited that the specters of the Good and Bad Person are unreal, they have proved difficult to exorcise. I had hoped that by renouncing religion, I could integrate myself and escape hypocrisy. For 25 years I have remained unable to escape from hypocrisy, but after successful trauma therapy last year, I have begun to hope that integration is possible. That is: I might be able to go into my psyche/body and undo some of the beliefs that turned me against myself; to understand where this desire to be a Good Person came from, that seems so disconnected from realness, and to find why I think that if I am not Good I must be Bad.
Doing this work benefits from a kind of inner poetics, a commitment to imagination as a modality of healing. You can get there any number of ways: Internal Family Systems therapy, or EMDR, or somatics, or psychedelics. These are practices through which we find nodes bunched inside our selves, like wires tangled in a room-sized computer; out of sight, but still hot. To understand what causes them to operate, you not only have to understand to what is happening inside you right now, but to imagine different futures, and most important, different pasts. In other words, as Coleridge said, "to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a straight line assume to our Understanding a circular motion." My progress in this endeavor doesn't move in a straight line but that's probably as it should be.
This is the work of growing up, which the authoritarian state does not want us do to, since authoritarianism requires binary thinking to survive. The basis of this administration's priorities is the strong delineation between groups. We are men or women. Citizens or aliens. Ambiguity will not be tolerated. Politically, authoritarianism wants me to take a side but it doesn't matter which, since it is equally usefulif I am a follower or an enemy. The refusal of authoritarianism, then, is the refusal of binary thinking, which by extension is the refusal of trust in institutions to work out morality on my behalf. It means giving up the hope that I can be a Good Person as well as my belief in Bad People. And this is why the social media posts gloating about Charlie Kirk's death kept me up at night, although I could not articulate it yet. Charlie Kirk the real human being is dead, but under authoritarianism the specters of Charlie Kirk the Good Person and Charlie Kirk the Bad Person will never be laid in their graves.
By contrast, letting people be flawed and complicated—that is, looking at each person as an amalgam of things I find safe and dangerous, right and wrong—is not meaningless neutrality. Human morality is always incomplete; no one can ever be a moral person to everyone. You have to understand what your values are deeply, rather than just keeping up party lines and outward appearances of morality. And, this is very important, understand that your moral system is only one among many. For me, that means seeking to enter a moral framework that is beyond binaries and to stop thinking of myself as a binary subject.
The maelstrom is an occasion for fear, but also for curiosity. Unlike in Poe's story, there has not been a single moment when I realized I needed to lash myself to the cask and jump overboard. Instead, there have been many small points at which I have made small decisions. The inner maelstrom is an uncomfortable place, but that discomfort offers a choice: we integrate ourselves, become responsible for our viewpoints and actions, or we become an enemy bent on doing combat with other enemies, living in the world of Good and Bad.
Right now, I believe we must not prioritize politics over every other category of human endeavor. I know it sounds insane to be asking this, in a time of political upheaval. But over the course of my lifetime, more Americans have been trading their curiosity and civility for political slogans, sheltering inside thought bubbles both physical and virtual. While algorithms have accelerated this process, we started long before the internet. Between the 1970s and today, the number of Americans living in politically homogeneous places (that is, counties where landslide elections routinely take place) has greatly increased. (note 6) And since 2020, I have seen more Americans willing to cut off friends and family on the basis of religious or political differences alone. We are looking down the barrels of a polycrisis that is rooted, not in humans' inability to look past their differences to work together, but in humans' inability to agree on the most basic tenets of reality. Clinging to our viewpoints, taking sides, and following ideology is how we got here. Doubling down will only drag us further.
The past couple of years have been internally destabilizing for me. The future is less predictable, that's part of it, but it's also because I realized that the paradigm I had been operating under my entire adult life no longer works, if it ever did. While I've never been a card-carrying member of a political party, I have always thought that being strongly aligned with a political paradigm was a personal virtue. I am now, to my surprise, starting see ideological alliances as a hindrance, sometimes even a danger.
One last image: over the years, the 10 of Swords has become an unlikely talisman of mine, one also liable to appear in the middle of the night. Pamela Colman Smith's illustration is dire to be sure, but my interpretation of the card is a little different than many tarot manuals. The suit of Swords represents the intellect and the number 10 symbolizes going beyond a complete cycle into overflow—or burnout. In this case, a literal dead end. For me, then, the 10 of Swords shows up when I can no longer think my way out of a problem. The time for cogitation and careful argumentation is over; the old way of doing things no longer works. Every sword we have has been turned against us. Whether the dark clouds in the background are bringing on a long night or they are drifting away to reveal morning will depend on whether or not we can move away from the divisiveness that led us here in the first place.
By letting go of the swords, I want to abandon the hope of mural purity. What I'm seeking is not a guarantee of physical safety or comfort. Instead, to move thinking into doing, to elevate imperfect action over simply refraining from harm. I can't know before I act if I will do harm or not. I know will not look back at this time and say, "I was innocent." Instead, I will say "innocence was impossible and I lived anyway."
❡
Charlotte Beradt recorded other kinds of dreams, too: those of people who found their footing and acted in accordance with their own morality. In one dream, a woman who was in waking life a member of the underground resistance obtained a fake passport to escape the country.
But when I opened the passport I saw it was an Estonian passport for a twenty-nine-year-old woman, that was okay, but it was covered with stamps saying she had a politically incriminating past. I was still paging through it when I found myself in front of a customs official standing by the train. I smiled and handed him the passport to be stamped. You've just got to decide you want to, I said to myself. And even though he raised his eyebrows at me, I got through. p.86
Beradt does not indicate whether this woman survived the war, but the phrase, "You've just got to decide you want to," transcends her dream. However long she lived after sharing that dream, she did not outlive her conscience.
The decisiveness of her dream-self mirrors that of the third brother in Poe's story.
I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design—but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation.
He did not know why casks floated while he was inside the maelstrom, he had no explanation of cylinders being the shape most likely to escape being crushed. He just jumped onto one anyway; he observed what was happening and chose a course of action.
This man did not emerge from his ordeal unhurt. He was washed into an inlet and picked up by other fishermen sheltering from the storm. They did not recognize him at first because, during the few hours he spent in the maelstrom, his hair turned white and his face became wrinkled.
I pray that you and I have the same luck to emerge, hurt and white-headed, out of the waves. Alive.
Note 1 See this note for an explanation of why I use the term authoritarian instead of fascist in this essay. (return)
Note 2 For an exploration of why leftist moral arguments have often failed with voters, I recommend Jonathan Haidt's 2012 book The Righteous Mind. (return)
Note 3 Abrams, M.H. "Style and Structure in the Greater Romantic Lyric". from From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilies and Harold Bloom (return)
Note 4 Encyclopedia Britanica, 1911: Hartley Coleridge (return)
Note 5 Beradt, Charlotte. The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. trans. Damion Searls. Princeton UP, 2025.
Beradt's book covers the years between Hitler's rise to power and the start of World War II, a time when the will of the German people to go along with the Nazi project was high. This is in contrast to 1943 and later, when it was apparent to most "good Germans" that they had been dragged into a war that was impossible to win and were being sacrificed at the altar of Nazi ideology just like all the outcast groups. Beradt's caution about dreams was justified: as the war turned against the Axis, people were imprisoned or executed for telling jokes about Hitler or simply expressing pessimism about the outcome of the war. (return)
Note 6 The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart Bill Bishop, with Robert G. Cushing. Houghton Mifflin, 2008 (return)
Drafted September 23, 2025–August 30th, 2026. Published September 6th, 2026.