The title alludes to the "Passagen" (arcades) of nineteenth century Paris, and it also refers to Benjamin's effort to negotiate the "labyrinth" of his work and thought. And it foregrounds the figurative status of awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project. In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Benjamin projected a "macroscosmic journey" of the individual sleeper to "the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides." He credited the Surrealists with being the first to offer a means of deciphering the nineteenth century's "narcotic historicism, its passion for masks." He was well aware of the early Marx's remark that "reform of consciousness" will come when "people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it." But any such invocation of a past cannot draw on conscious recollection or antiquarian recovery. Rather, "the dialectical the Copernican turn of remembrance" functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come.
This is linked to the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin's undertaking. Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening is focused on Benjamin's work of the 1930's, though it reaches back to earlier writings too in order to establish certain continuities. It is focused on central issues of Benjamin's later work: the interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism; the conception of language; the fading of aura and its relation to image; the genre of The Arcades Project; citation as the key structural principle of The Arcades Project; the status of messianism in Benjamin's thought; the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening in the later work.