What World War II Soldiers' Dreams Were Made Of
Soldiers In Bunks, San Francisco 1942 NARA Endless meals. Family. Escape. These were the dreams of 79 British soldiers who were captured in an early World War II battle and imprisoned in Germany, according to the dream journals kept by one of the prisoners. Recently analyzed for the first time by a Harvard psychologist, the journals show a population more influenced by prison life than the traumas of battle. Maj. Kenneth Hopkins, who even as a prisoner of war was concerned about completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., took notes every day about the dreams he and his fellow prisoners experienced. He recorded 640 dreams in six journals, five of which eventually made it to the Wellcome Collection, a London research archive. It was there that Harvard Medical School's Deirdre Barret, an...