"We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake"
About this Quote
Fromm slips a quiet blade between two modern certainties: that we are rational, and that we are in control. The line starts with an uncontroversial “we all dream,” then pivots to the more embarrassing fact that we mostly have no idea what we’re watching when our own brains stage their nightly theater. The real target isn’t dreams; it’s our complacency. We treat the unconscious like background noise because taking it seriously would mean admitting that “the self” is not a single, consistent manager but a coalition with factions, impulses, and symbolic languages.
The sentence is built on a comparative insult: dreams are “strange” only when measured against what we flatter as “logical, purposeful” waking thought. Fromm’s subtext is that this contrast is partly propaganda. Waking life is hardly as coherent as we pretend; it’s just better edited. By calling the dream-mind “sleep minds” (plural, suggestive), he hints at multiplicity: different modes of knowing, different internal voices. That pluralization quietly challenges the Enlightenment fantasy of one unified rational subject.
Context matters. Fromm, a humanistic psychoanalyst shaped by Freud, Marx, and mid-century anxieties about conformity, is less interested in dream decoding as parlor trick than in what it reveals about alienation. If we can accept hours of nightly irrationality without curiosity, we can also accept the irrationality of our daytime routines, institutions, and “common sense.” The quote works because it turns a private oddity into a cultural critique: the strangest thing isn’t dreaming; it’s how easily we normalize not understanding ourselves.
The sentence is built on a comparative insult: dreams are “strange” only when measured against what we flatter as “logical, purposeful” waking thought. Fromm’s subtext is that this contrast is partly propaganda. Waking life is hardly as coherent as we pretend; it’s just better edited. By calling the dream-mind “sleep minds” (plural, suggestive), he hints at multiplicity: different modes of knowing, different internal voices. That pluralization quietly challenges the Enlightenment fantasy of one unified rational subject.
Context matters. Fromm, a humanistic psychoanalyst shaped by Freud, Marx, and mid-century anxieties about conformity, is less interested in dream decoding as parlor trick than in what it reveals about alienation. If we can accept hours of nightly irrationality without curiosity, we can also accept the irrationality of our daytime routines, institutions, and “common sense.” The quote works because it turns a private oddity into a cultural critique: the strangest thing isn’t dreaming; it’s how easily we normalize not understanding ourselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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