The skull is a thin barrier against totalitarianism. The system is total because the brain itself is recruitable; every intimate space can be touched. Hannah Arendt once recorded the words of a Nazi official to that effect: “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.” But this is wrong. Sleep is exactly where the stress of living under such a terrorizing regime could reveal itself—in dreams.

Charlotte Beradt, a German Jewish journalist who experienced Hitler’s rise from her middle-class Berlin neighborhood, found the messages contained in her friends’ and neighbors’ dreams irresistibly interesting. They were reflections in the psyche, she wrote, tracing “as minutely as a seismograph” the changes happening in waking life. Starting in 1933, she wrote down these dreams—or “nightaries,” she called them, for night diaries—and, fearing the regime, she rendered them in code. “Hitler” became “Uncle Hans”; “the party” became “the family”; an “arrest” became the “flu.” She hid what surely sounded like the stories of a clan of sickly people beholden to a strange uncle in the spines of large books in her library until she could smuggle them out of the country. She knew how dangerous her collecting was—some of the people whose accounts she recorded even dreamed that dreaming itself had been made illegal.

It took Beradt until 1966 to turn her 300 “nightaries” into a book, The Third Reich of Dreams. By then she was living in New York City, reconstituting her life after escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. She worked for a time in her apartment as a hairdresser to other emigrés—including Marc Chagall’s wife, Bella—and became close with Arendt, even translating some of her English-language essays into German. Beradt’s own book became something of a cult classic, known among those interested in the deep effects of authoritarianism on human behavior and thought, but it nevertheless went out of print. This spring, it is being reissued in a crisp new translation from Damion Searls.

Beradt recorded the dreams of people experiencing immense political stress and a seeping sense of fear. They are the kinds of anxiety dreams one might expect in any tense, unstable situation—these just happen to have swastikas. A household stove starts to speak in a “shrill, penetrating voice” and share family secrets; the walls of a home collapse; someone slowly lifts his arm into a Hitler salute over half an hour until the pressure makes his spine snap; a large nose becomes a dangerous liability. These were the dreams of people breaking under pressure. Much weirder to encounter are the dreams of people bending under it—visions that Beradt believed exposed a deep wish to conform.

Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler’s terrible tariffs

Beradt is no Freudian. She wants us to know this. For her, these are not personal dramas playing out in someone’s head. They don’t contain hidden, symbolic meanings. If you dreamed in 1933 that Hitler was caressing your shoulders, Freud would probably say you had issues with your father. For Beradt, this means one, very obvious thing, very much having to do with Hitler. She reads the dreams straightforwardly as attempts by the subconscious mind to make sense of a waking reality full of “half-truths, half-intuitions, facts, rumors, and conjunctures.” Shorn of daily propaganda and spin, they contain the kinds of exaggerations and distillations, the kinds of storytelling, that could make Nazism’s effects on the individual more shockingly legible: “The dreams are a blend of logical thought and guesswork; rational details combined into fantastical contexts and thereby made more, not less, coherent.”

So what coherent message emerges from these surreal dreams of conformity?

Beradt offers up a series of them. Many involve Hitler suddenly transforming into a charming, sociable fellow. In one, the dictator appears in quite a telling getup: “high, shining patent-leather jackboots, like a lion tamer, and crumpled but sparkly purple satin pants like a circus clown.” This lion tamer/clown Hitler is the life of the party. Everyone is taken in by his “flirtatious” air. The dreamer at first is disgusted and prepares his comeback in case Hitler should approach him (“I have to be here but I know about the concentration camps and I’m opposed”). By the end of the dream, though, he is won over too. He looks down, and in his hands is the same collection box all of Hitler’s followers are carrying. “Well, maybe he’s not so bad,” he thinks to himself. “Maybe I’m taking all this trouble to be opposed for nothing.”

Other dreams follow the same pattern. A woman mocks a group of people singing political songs and then finds herself singing along. An older man is laughing at a newsreel featuring Hermann Goering in a brown leather vest, and then he himself is wearing the same vest and is being offered a job as Goering’s bodyguard. One report was a simple statement: “I dreamt I said, ‘I don’t have to always say No anymore.’”

Beradt interprets these dreams as a side effect of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, or synchronizing. Germans were supposed to align their thinking with the regime and squash any inclination toward dissent. The dreams disclose a desire to succumb to this process. “Freedom is a burden; unfreedom comes as a relief,” she writes—the most chilling line in the book.

She is confident about her reading, but I’m not sure I completely follow her logic. There are at least two reasons someone would have a dream of collaboration. It’s possible that the person secretly wishes to join the saluting masses, but it’s equally plausible that they, more than others, are subconsciously warning themselves, preparing to put up a fight. The drive to conform is strong; it’s arguably what has allowed our social species to survive as long as it has. But just as strong is the moral conscience: the worry that you won’t be able to live with yourself if you violate an inner code. The realm of sleep might be the perfect place for this battle to rage, and though Beradt thinks that someone who collaborates in their dreams is probably already considering doing so in real life, they might in fact be flirting with unfreedom subconsciously as a way of relieving this particular itch and fortifying themselves.

Read: Looks like Mussolini, quacks like Mussolini

The tools of psychoanalysis could actually help here, connecting the dreamer with the shape of the dream. Freud did not deny that external stimuli could affect the subconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he refers to an experiment in which an alarm clock was rung next to two sleepers. One dreams of a church bell tolling, and the other hears sleigh bells. If a patient spent enough time on the couch, the analyst could account for the difference. But because Beradt wants to read the dreams she records as straight projections of political reality, it’s hard to tell whether these night fantasies about surrendering to Hitler’s charms are the product of weak, susceptible minds or those sharply attuned to the moral stakes.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Beradt’s point is a more basic one: Authoritarianism hijacks people’s brains. Her book reveals a real-time shock at how thoroughly and quickly the Nazis stormed into those deepest recesses. Sex dreams about Hitler, she hints, were not uncommon. Those actively resisting the regime kept battling and escaping Nazis when they closed their eyes. One woman who produced and distributed an illegal newspaper told Beradt about dreams of vengeance that sound like scenes from a Quentin Tarantino film: jumping from balcony to balcony, tearing down swastika flags, and stabbing her pursuers one by one.

A friend of mine—an American citizen, I should add—recounted to me a dream he had last week. He was at the Canadian border and trying to reenter the United States, but was stopped by border guards. He was carrying a gun in his backpack and was about to make it through undetected, but then the guards noticed something amiss in his paperwork and decided to search him. When it became clear they were going to find the gun, he woke up in a panic. What would Beradt make of this nightmare—of the anxiety it exhibits about surveillance and authority and displacement? And what might she deduce about the atmosphere of fear and violence that inspired it?

Her analysis of dreams taps into a primordial function that night visions played in human society long before Freud showed up. They were in fact treated like psychic seismographs, picking up disturbances and instability, prophecies of good fortune or doom. To know if the crops would thrive this season or what the king’s death portended, premodern people turned to the subconscious as a tool for seeing beyond what was immediately accessible to them. Understood this way, dreams are perfect for registering nascent authoritarianism and the ways its repressions actually unfold: not as a single announcement or explosive act but as a steady, growing rumble while the ground beneath your feet begins to shift.