The Dreams of the Prisoners
Sensibili alle foglie archive
photocopied manuscript of transcriptions from prisoners’ dreams, 1984
The Dreams of the Prisoners is the first document produced by sensibili alle foglie archive (http://www.sensibiliallefoglie.it/). In the year 1984, a group of prisoners in the “special prisons” (carceri speciale), constructed for the prisoners coming from the armed struggle in Italy – isolated, with almost no contact with the exterior word- decided to put in common their dreams. The dreams where then transcribed and the photocopy of the original manuscript is now inside a vitrine in the Spanish Pavilion.
Nicola Valentino was one of those prisoners and yesterday he told the following story, in answer to my question: “In the circumstances that these dreams were transcribed, what you had in mind had anything to do with Freudian psychoanalysis, very specially in the relation to censorship and codification?”
He answered:
No, we did not have Freud in mind. We did not want to interpret those dreams, we wanted to transmit them. But curiously, these transcription of dreams came at a very special moment. Until then, already with almost ten years of captivity behind us, we had held us together with the myth of revolutionary identity: we were soldiers. Our personal situation, children, wife, mother, did not matter – what mattered was the revolution and our condition of revolutionaries. What mattered, was the refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the power that had imprisoned us. But in those years, 1984, our revolutionary identity started to collapse. We did not believe it any more, and the personal started to weight a lot more than the revolutionary. And then we put our dreams in common, and we saw that many of us had identical dreams. And at that very moment, our revolutionary community was substituted by an oniric community. We were a community of dreams, and this was a way of communicating with each other and surviving there.
So we transcribed our dreams and we put them together and we sent it outside, on each of the pages a stamp: “approved by the censor”.
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