Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, begins with the story of his childhood. Places and names are significant to this narrative. At his birth, Mandela was given the name Rolihlahla (“pulling the branches off the tree,” read: “troublemaker”). When he was sent away to school at age seven, he acquired a clan name, Madiba, and his first teacher, in accordance with colonial custom, gave him a Christian name, Nelson. After a rebellious youth, Mandela eventually made his way to the University of the Witwatersrand, where he slowly worked toward a degree (repeatedly failing his qualifying exams) as the only black law student.

As a young lawyer practicing in Johannesburg in the 1940s, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) Party. In 1951, after the National Party took power, he helped organize the Defiance Campaign in response to the new apartheid laws. When the ANC’s nonviolent tactics were met with violent reprisals from the Afrikaner government, Mandela began advocating for a different strategy. In 1961, he publicly stated, “If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our non-violent struggle, we will have to reconsider our tactics.” The young leader suffered a series of bans, served several jail sentences, and eventually cofounded the militant wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe(or MK). He went underground and undertook guerrilla warfare training, but was eventually captured and tried at the infamous Rivonia Trial, in which he and seven other ANC members were found guilty of a series of charges related to sabotage. Narrowly escaping the death penalty, Mandela was sentenced to life in prison on June 12, 1964. He did not see freedom again for twenty-seven years. When he was released on February 11, 1990, he went on to lead the transitional government and became the first democratically elected president of South Africa, serving just one term, from 1994 to 1999.

One of the most harrowing sections of Mandela's autobiography is called “The Dark Years.” The section’s title refers to the years he spent imprisoned on Robben Island. It reads like a training manual for surviving dark times. Madiba describes the various hardships imposed at the newly designed prison: a discriminatory dress code and segregated diet that the National Party created for each of the four racial classes they invented, brutal forced labour at the island’s lime quarry, and harsh restrictions on visitors and letters (one visitor and one letter were permitted every six months, always censored, often denied altogether). There is a sparse account of Mandela’s devastation at the news his mother’s death in 1968. This grief was deepened less than a year later when he received a telegram informing him of his eldest son’s death as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash. Each of these experiences imposed a distinct psychological pressure: “The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner,” Mandela counsels, “is how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.”

Amongst these soul-rending accounts, Mandela relays one of his nightmares to his readers, which, he reports, returned repeatedly to haunt him during his twenty-seven-year imprisonment:

I had one recurring nightmare. In the dream, I had just been released from prison—only it was not Robben Island, but a jail in Johannesburg. I walked outside the gates into the city and found no one there to meet me. In fact, there was no one there at all, no people, no cars, no taxis. I would then set out on foot toward Soweto. I walked for many hours before arriving in Orlando West, and then turned the corner toward 8115. Finally, I would see my home, but it turned out to be empty, a ghost house, with all the doors and windows open, but no one at all there.

The astonishing passage seems just as dramatic as Mandela's  famous speech from the Rivonia Trial in which he named apartheid’s injustice and defined the ideal for which he was prepared to die: a democratic and free society. The nightmare seems to attest something similarly poignant about the leader's experience of prison, offering both a private account of his emotional state and a profound testimony about the political conditions of his unfreedom. 

As Sigmund Freud taught us, dreaming is a distinct species of thinking. In The Interpretation of Dreams, her wrote: “At bottom, dreams are nothing more than particular form of thinking made possible by the condition of the state of sleep.” Dreams think, Freud insists, even as this psychological activity bears little affinity to the more familiar forms of conscious reasoning. 

More precisely, Freud proposed that a dreamer experiences her thoughts rather than “thinks” them in concepts. Dreams dramatize an idea, constructing a situation out of thoughts that have been transposed into images. While the particular scenes and actions of dream-life might seem utterly alien to waking-thought, they nevertheless arise out of incidents of our lived experience. Dream-life is anchored in the material world, tethered to the particular conflicts and conditions of the dreamer’s social situation. 

Sharon Sliwinski is the director of The Museum of Dreams and professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

"The Prisoner's Nightmare" is an excerpt from Mandela's Dark Years (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) which is freely available on Manifold, an open-source platform.