“In the last case it is clear that state censorship played its part, but the distortion of dreams should also be understood as psychic protection from the messages they carry. When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal, for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted. Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language.”
Quote by Walter Benjamin
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The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
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