Twenty-six dreams in the collection express themes of admiration and identification with the sitting president. In the previous chapter we looked at dreams of conflict with paternal and patriarchal authority, and in this one – we see that dreamers who approve and identify with Trump in their sleep are similarly possessed by a positive, idealizing paternal transference, Trump as the object of their fatherly admiration:

The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

~ Luke 12:53 King James Bible

This chapter draws from over ninety two dreams that either depict women’s dreams, or dreams of women’s concerns including: dreams of misogyny, dreams of sexual abuse, dreams of seduction and attraction, and dreams of motherhood.

Themes that I have classified as undoing and reversal are prominent in approximately sixty-eight dreams in this collection. “Undoing” is a psychological defense closely related to denial – an attempt to negate a disapproved action by asserting the opposite, annulling one impulse with another.

“To find mass communications emerging to play a role in these dreams seemed in itself significant. Propaganda occupies a separate sphere in the totalitarian world, and the Hitler regime was the first of its kind to manipulate public opinion by making full use of these technical accomplices, in the same way it made use of its functionaries. Propaganda was well as it functionaries had acquired an autonomous quality in this official’s dreams becoming true apparitions of a new order.” ~ Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, p 40

Civil norms were violated quickly, early and often in the election and during the first year that Trump held office: Name-calling, lying, gas-lighting, explicit racism and misogyny, religious travel bans, threats of nuclear war via social media – Americans quickly learned how fragile their national protocols for conduct and ethics were.

In a chapter entitled “The Everyday World by Night” Charlotte Beradt reports dreams of household objects, lamps, couch pillows, ovens that develop the power of speech and reveal all their owner’s secrets. Beradt uses these dreams to explore the pervasive fear of surveillance in Germany of the 1930’s (as will we when we discuss surveillance dreams).

The Roman trickster god Mercury (the Greek Hermes) “was looked upon as the patron of good luck and fortune, the patron of merchants and thieves,” And the volatile world of of commerce – derives its language “mercantile” merchandise” “market” from the god’s Roman name embedded in the Latin “mercatus” . Approximately thirty three of these dream-narratives focus on the impact of the Trumpist era on their ability to negotiate and fare for themselves in the national marketplace.

Twenty-one dreams in this dream collection were similar to my initial dream which launched this project, where the dreamers found themselves caring for either an impaired or childlike president:

This chapter focuses on just two dreams, both fairly lengthy, remarkably similar and yet diametrically opposed:

There has been a great deal of speculation about Trump’s mental and legal competency. News articles, op-ed writers and Ivy League professors analyze his impulsivity, and his compulsive lying. Speech analysts examine his verbal skills and idiosyncratic use of language for signs of decline or dementia.

An inflation, however, is always threatened with a counter-stroke from the unconscious, C. G. Jung, CW, Answer to Job

In the previous chapter we focused on the ego inflation that is associated and activated by Trumpism, Let’s recall that, for the purposes of this discussion, these are not dreams about Donald Trump as a man, but about the archetypes that he channels unconsciously (and also perhaps consciously and manipulatively) and that we as a nation project upon him.

I would suggest that we speak instead of “psychic inflation.” The term seems to me appropriate in so far as the state we are discussing involves an extension of the personality beyond individual limits, in other words, a state of being puffed up. In such a state a man fills a space, which normally he cannot fill. He can only fill it by appropriating to himself contents and qualities, which properly exist for them alone and should therefore remain outside our bounds. ~ C. G. Jung, CW The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious