Chloe Nahum

Herbert Hillier, 'Dreams! The 'Guard' Off Duty, July 2nd 1915' pencil drawing

Chloe Nahum completed an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership entitled ‘‘To dream as I have never dreamed before’: Dreaming and the First World War’ (2018 - 2023).

A partnership between IWM and the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, her thesis examines the dream as a cultural and experiential phenomenon of the First World War.

It argues that the war engendered an epidemic of dreaming which was reflected in, and in turn influenced by, a distinctive cultural prominence of the dream. Emerging theories of ‘shell shock’, popular dream interpretation guides, and Freudian conceptualisations of the unconscious all figure as elements of a broad and pervasive interest in the dream at this time. Combatants and civilians alike heeded their oneiric lives with a new urgency, often according their night-time phantasms a status equivalent to waking life.

Through a wide range of media, including published literary material, visual sources, diaries, and letters, the thesis traces the consequences of the war upon the significance and experience of the dream in British culture.

War and the Mind

IWM

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Transcript

Dr Chloe Nahum, researcher: “The soldier's dream is a really popular trope during the war. You see it reproduced on posters, postcards, and it's an image of a soldier who's asleep in a trench and above him is a dream of the home front. So, in the dream, he's reconnected to his family. And that was an idea that was replayed in the press, too, as a kind of comfort to the home front. Lots of soldiers were dreaming about home and the comfort of home, so, in the kind of stark contrast to the waking environment they were dreaming of their mother, that recurs a lot, um, or a good meal. I think what gradually happens is that, particularly after the publication in 1915 of an article in The Lancet about soldiers’ dreams or nightmares, this starts to seep into the popular press.

The newspapers begin to report on this new phenomenon of soldiers’ nightmares, and that kind of pushes out the more romantic, comforting trope of the soldier dreaming of home, which we find in posters, postcards, and places like that to, instead, an interest in the press in more the nightmare, the trauma dream, as we would see it now.

Those were often reproduced on the front page of newspapers. Ideas about Freudian dream interpretation, for example, how that was being used to cure shell shock nightmares. That, that replays a lot in the press at the time. Lots of dreams of shells, of course. That is one of the most commonly reported dreams, both in medical literature and in people's first-hand accounts of their dream lives. But also of the mud, the mud of the Western Front.

People finding themselves trapped in the mud that is something that lots of soldiers wrote about too. During the war there’s a real surge in the publication of dream manuals and dream interpretation guides and you often find these published both in the trench journal for soldiers, but also slotted in to, say, the newspaper on the home front as an interpretation guide, which will give you reassurances as to the safety of your loved one if you, say, dream of diamonds or something like that, which we still see today in the kind of symbolic interpretation of dreams.

Something that occurred to me quite late on was that people who were suffering from nightmares, soldiers who were returning home, were sleeping side by side with their wives or in the same house as their children and these people could often, kind of, were experiencing some part of their trauma through sleep talking. So, I was surprised that I was able to find some accounts of those written by, particularly the wives of soldiers, and also to find that it was a trope that comes up in a lot of literature written by women during the war. The idea of the sleep talking soldier. So that was something that I found really surprising.”

IWM's War and the Mind exhibition ran from 27 September 2024 - 27 April 2025.

The exhibition explored the many psychological dimensions of war and featured groundbreaking research projects funded by UK Research and Innovation, in particular the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

A film featuring Chloe's project was part of the Fighting Wars section of the exhibition. In this video, Chloe talks about the social and cultural importance of dreams during the First World War.