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A young woman discovers in a dream that she is responsible for the Holocaust and tries to come up with schemes to make amends – and then gets distracted by a business meeting. Another woman dreams she is being chased by murderers – and ends up chilling in front of the TV with them. A man gets to advise Emmanuel Macron on social policy – and talks to him about haircuts and dog training instead.

Dreams can turn our innermost fears and darkest fantasies into miniature dramas. But an anthology of recollected dreams harvested from online forums across Europe shows how the story arc of the subconscious often bends towards anticlimaxes.

“Europeans seem to dream quite prosaically,” said Wolfram Lotz, a German playwright, poet and author of Dreams in Europe. “Of course dreams are always fantastical and ambiguous, but many of the dreams I have collected seem to lack imagination.”

For his book, Lotz spent five years reading thousands of entries on “dream forums” – online platforms where users submit accounts of their dreams and invite users to interpret their meaning – in more than 25 European languages, from English to Swiss Romansh. He translated them into German and edited them into short stories, some just a paragraph long.

While some of the dreams come from secular regions of the continent and others from countries that are more deeply religious, he was struck by “a surprising consistency” in the way they were structured.

“The narrative structures of many of the European dreams I used in my book is that they start with an adventure, a daring journey, which is then interrupted, sidetracked or simply goes up in a puff of smoke,” Lotz said.

There is the dream of the woman who is chased across a suburban landscape by two sinister-looking men who she is certain are intent on burning her alive. She breaks into an empty house but the two men follow and corner her. Then they sit together at the dining table to watch the news and crack hazelnuts. Eventually, the woman gets up and leaves.

“Of course that has something to do with how we live on this continent,” Lotz said. “When we fall ill, we go to a doctor who gives us a medicine, and in most cases we soon feel better. Or when someone steals something from us then that may in the past have been the start of a long chase, but today we just call our insurance and that’s it.”

In another dream, a 34-year-old woman is walking through a shopping centre when she suddenly realises “I used to be Hitler”. She is distraught and considers whether to help pensioners across the road or give money to the homeless to redeem her sins. Then she notices that in her turmoil she has forgotten about a job interview, and the existential confrontation with historical trauma makes way for the more humdrum business of work schedules.

Another dream tells of a hobby gardener’s surprise encounter with a large, furry creature with pointy horns. “Now I will show you what it means to live without a god,” the being tells the dreamer in a “non-human” voice. But then the monster disappears, the dreamer continues to focus on the gardening, and nothing further happens.

“All these collected dreams have an understated melancholy or sadness. There isn’t much transcendence left in the European mentality: God is dead, and the present lies mutely in front of us, without facing the future,” Lotz said.

Lotz, 45, an award-winning playwright, whose 3,000-word work of autofiction Holy Scripture I has gained a cult following in Germany and invited comparisons to Karl Ove Knausgård, said that unlike those contributing to the forums where he found his collection of cryptic tales, it was not his job to decipher them.

Indeed, what to make of the dream where someone discovers a little bird living in their anus? Or of someone having to stick app icons to an iPad screen with tape because they keep falling like pictures off a wall? The meaning of a dream, the book suggests, can sometimes lie in the very absence of meaning.

“When the media talks about Europe, it rattles through a series of discursive chains: Brexit, Frontex [the EU’s border agency], Schengen and so on,” Lotz said. “But it barely touches on the reality of what Europe feels like. For me, the mission of this book is to explore this continent beyond the discourse.”

There are exceptions. In some of the short texts, there is a sense that political events broadcast by the media have seeped into people’s subconscious. One dreamer bumps into Boris Johnson in the street, who invites him over to have tea and cake with Angela Merkel – a scenario possibly inspired by the former British prime minister “wanting to have his cake and eat it” during negotiations over the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU. Another person dreams of being invited to the Élysée Palace to advise Macron on how to heal the social divisions running through France.

“The big historical events of our time – Brexit, Trump, Covid – don’t register on the surface of these dreams as much as you would expect,” Lotz said. “The only exception is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shows up in many of the dreams I found on Ukrainian- and Russian-language forums.”

Tellingly, many European dreams are not set in Europe at all but in the US. There are dreams about witnessing a nuclear bomb attack and fearing it would set off a war with Japan; about meeting American girls on Facebook and hoping they will turn up to birthday parties in Romania; about erotic encounters with Hollywood stars; about being sent on a mission to buy eye drops for Tina Turner.

In one dream tale, the narrator studies an atlas and breaks out in tears upon discovering that the United States has “separated” and its states have drifted apart on the map. Lotz said the emotional timbre of the dream reminded him of someone finding out about their parents’ divorce.

“I look at a dream like that and I think: surely it knows something about how Europeans’ relationship with the United States is changing,” he said. “Dreams aren’t just froth. They know something.”