Dream Notes

"Dreams are as black as death." --Theodor W. Adorno Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them downthroughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of themalthough in the event no more than a few appeared in hislifetime. Dream Notes offers a selection of Adornos writings ondreams that span the last twenty-five years of his life. Readers ofAdorno who are accustomed to high-powered reflections onphilosophy, music and culture may well find them disconcerting:they provide an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of hisinner desires, guilt feelings and anxieties. Brothel scenes,torture and executions figure prominently. They are presentedstraightforwardly, at face value. No attempt is made to interpretthem, to relate them to the events of his life, to psychoanalysethem, or to establish any connections with the principal themes ofhis philosophy. Are they fiction, autobiography or an attempt to capture apre-rational, quasi-mythic state of consciousness? No clear answercan be given. Taken together they provide a highly consistentpicture of a dimension of experience that is normally ignored, onethat rounds out and deepens our knowledge of Adorno while retainingsomething of the enigmatic quality that energized his ownthought.