Dreaming in crisis

Abstract

This article explores how socio-political crises that implicate teachers and students play out in dreams about the psychical and material realities of schooling. Teacher dreaming during crisis reveals the impossibility of the dream of education – a fantasy of control, protection, and transformation of students. The author analyzes her own teacher fantasies of protecting and transforming students during crisis as they are unfurled in her dreams to be just that, fantasies. The crises of violence and remoteness, as engendered by antisemitism, school fighting, and Covid-19, expose the fissures of this fantasy through the transferential time and ties of teaching. Ultimately, the conflicts that ensue from dreaming during crisis generate possibilities of learning through crisis.