The art of daydreaming: How Ernst Bloch and Mariette Lydis defied Freud and transformed their daydreams through writing and art

We all dream. Even my dog dreams; he whines when he dreams, perhaps because his dreams are as filled with anxiety as my own sometimes are. Dreams – bad dreams and nightmares, particularly – can be profoundly unsettling and disturbing. They can shock and terrify us because they cannot be controlled: they are their own narrators, and the only way we can resolve their penetrating stories is by attempting to interrupt them. Only by jolting ourselves and waking up, we can enlighten ourselves and come to light, and only by generating daydreams, we can counteract the malign influences of bad dreams and nightmares and take charge of our lives. Bad dreams and nightmares can bring dread and devastating realizations: they can leave us marooned in our past. Daydreams, by contrast, can generate options, and perhaps a renewed joy in life as well: they demand that, despite obstacles and despair, we move onwards into the future. They are artful stories; they are the art of utopia and are filled with our wishes and anticipatory illumination. They appeal to us to become artists and narrators of our lives. Participating in the creative arts – writing, painting, acting and making music – is to envision dream-like visions of where we want to go with our lives. Without the arts, without writing especially, and without our conscious picturing the ideal other life, there is little possibility that our desires will be fulfilled. We need hope, and we need daydreams to map our destiny. I believe we need to act on our daydreams, and not slumber into nocturnal nightmares. These beliefs and ideas have been informed by studying the work of Ernst Bloch and his notions about daydreams (not nocturnal dreams). He is a neglected, iconoclastic philosopher, and I believe brilliant. In this article, I propose to discuss his theories about daydreams and then turn to the neglected, Austrian-Jewish painter Mariette Lydis, who in her various works offers proof that daydreams play an immense and important role in our creative lives. Contemporaries, both Bloch (1885–1977) and Lydis (1887–1970) wrote and/or painted during the same century as Freud (1856–1939) and Jung (1875–1961). Both were of Jewish origin. Both survived the First World War, the Nazis and the Second World War. Both kept realizing their desires for a better world through writing and picturing their writing.