Dreaming at the End of Empire: The Baltic Dreamscape of Jakob Vaarask, 1885-1917

This article examines the dreams of Jakob Vaarask (1862-1936), an Estonian Orthodox teacher and priest who, from 1889 to 1926, lived and worked on the island of Vormsi, for much of that period part of the Russian Empire's Estland province. I intend to show that dreams, rather than random and purely individual manifestations of the subconscious, can be used as historical sources, in Vaarask's case demonstrating the extent to which political propaganda and social hierarchies were internalised by individuals in the late Russian Empire.