February 25th, 2019

Emily Goebbels

I dream largely in narrative, and moreover in specific narrative formats. I’ve had text-only dreams in the form of a New Yorker article, but those are sort of rare–mainly my dreams are little movies, with a plot and characters. I am quite rarely in my dreams, nor is anyone I know. I dreams stories, mainly fictional ones.

On Friday night I dreamed an episode of the radio program The Ongoing History of New Music with Alan Cross, a show I like a lot and am familiar with the format, hence my ability to dream it–so this was my first dream that was audio-only. Cool. It was about the singer-songwriter Emily Goebbels, who has made some beautiful music but is a pretty troubled figure even for the music scene and periodically drops out of sight. It turns out she comes by her drama honestly–she’s actually the great-great granddaughter of one of the worst criminals of the 20th century, Joseph Goebbels.

If you don’t already know, as Mark did instantly upon waking up Saturday morning when I started telling him about my dream (I’m a joy to live with), there is no such person as Emily Goebbels nor could there ever possibly have been because Joseph and his wife murdered their children and then committed suicide at the end of World War II. So there is no possibility of a descendant becoming a slightly goth indie-rocker.

I’m not as well-informed as Mark, so I have been reading Wikipedia articles about Joseph and Magda Goebbels, who apparently murdered the children not out of fear of a worse death for them at the hands of the Red Army (as I had innocently hoped) but instead of allowing them to be taken out of Berlin by the Red Cross because Magda was worried about the children knowing their father’s true reputation as a monster.

Jesus. So this turns out to be a really dark dream even though I didn’t entirely realize it at first. Many of my dreams are semi-nightmares but this one sort of snuck up on me and I don’t like it, even though I’m all for the experiment with narrative form. I also read a bit about the children who sound like sweethearts but honestly the oldest was 12 so who wouldn’t be a sweetheart? There is a play and some books written about them I don’t know if I’ll be up for reading those–I don’t have a lot of heart for getting really into this, I don’t think. I wish Emily Goebbels was a real person.

What format do you dream in?

EDIT: After posting this Sunday evening and thinking so much about dream formats, on Sunday night I dreamt an encyclopedia entry about the plague and the various ways it killed people that was extremely graphic and disturbing… It sounds funny that the dream somehow included the cast of Murphy Brown, but honestly that did not make it any less alarming. Unconscious brain, what is going on with you? I do not like this.