Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project has the immodest aim of providing its reader a ‘graphic perception of the nineteenth century’. This incomplete project is also the major statement of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic conception of revolution. In the technological achievements of the nineteenth century, symbolized in the form and material of the Paris arcades and related phenomena, Benjamin sees a specific wish expressed in dream images. According to this analysis, the ‘dream collective’ of the nineteenth century dreams of a genuinely collective life in its sensations, visions and fantasies. The collective life is experienced in the pleasure of being in a crowd in great cities, which he thinks is akin to the ecstasy of religious intoxication. However, this century is also depicted as in the thrall of a ‘narcotic historicism’ and a ‘passion for masks’ [A [K1a, 6] 391]. 

This paper will analyse the components of Benjamin’s idea of the dream vision of collective existence in the nineteenth century. It will focus specifically on two issues: the rationale for his insistence on characterising the nineteenth century’s dreams as ‘collective dreams’; and why he thinks that ‘a signal of true historical existence’ is to be found in the nineteenth century dream images.