DREAMS

DREAMS . The category of dreams designates both sleeping and imaginal states of consciousness together with waking descriptions and other representations of these states. Sleeping consciousness includes healing dreams, prophetic dreams, archetypal dreams, nightmares, and lucid dreams. Imaginal consciousness includes guided fantasies known as waking dreams, omens, and visions.

Dreaming is both a sleeping and a waking experience that is activated whenever energy flows inward toward the spiritual and intellectual senses rather than outward toward the worldly and perceptual senses. When one falls into a trance or falls asleep, the worldly senses vanish inside, the everyday mind stops functioning, and one is sleeping. After a period of nothingness, the mind begins to function again, and dreaming begins. As this happens one slowly moves from private sensations, personal memories, images, and symbols to transpersonal imagining as an interactive social process.

The Cross-Cultural Study of Dreams

From the earliest times sleeping dreams and waking visions have been of considerable interest to humankind. Dream narratives have also been examined to learn how members of different cultures categorize and use their dreams. Some researchers have shown both the tactical use of dreams in social interaction and the cultural influences on dream content. Others have chosen not to focus their attention on dream narratives or social context but rather to use dreams to investigate psychological issues, such as personality and values.

Before Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), scholars described dreams as the ultimate source of religious beliefs concerning the supernatural and the nature of the human soul. After Freud's book, many people followed him in separating the nature of the dream experience, or the "manifest dream," from the so-called real meaning of the experience, which he labeled the "latent dream." The manifest dream content is investigated with the help of a dreamer's associations to the key elements in the dream that are traced to the dreamer's hidden or latent thoughts, consisting of a combination of wishes and conflicts. The manifest dream content—though often distorted, disguised, or presented in metaphorical form—and the latent dream content are in turn linked to a distinction between two modes of thought: primary and secondary process. Primary process consists of nonlogical symbolic imagery, whereas secondary process is predominantly verbal and logical.

A number of researchers who were interested in the cross-cultural study of dreams utilized Freudian concepts and methodologies. Some, however, remained skeptical and tested the key hypotheses. Others ignored the approach altogether. Those who followed Freud's psychoanalytic theories and methods argued that similar latent contents—including incestuous family attachments, sibling rivalry, anxiety about maternal separation, and fear of castration—are revealed in dream reports gathered in vastly different cultures. The ethnographer Anthony Wallace (1958) even described the Iroquois of North America as having independently invented their own psychoanalytic techniques of dream interpretation.

Other researchers employed one or more of the following Freudian methodologies in working with dreams:

1. eliciting associations to dream images as they are related,
2. focusing on an element containing a metaphorical key to the meaning of the dream,
3. asking for the previous day's events connected with the dream,
4. allowing the subject to freely associate to the dream.

The ethnographer Dorothy Eggan (1966), for example, did not press her Hopi consultants for the previous day's residue or free associations but allowed them to take the initiative in dream telling and free association. The psychoanalyst Géza Róheim (1952), on the other hand, obtained associations from Australian Aborigines for each dream episode and elicited personal anecdotes, myths, and songs. Because he was focused on the infantile wish rather than on current conflicts, he suggested that an analyst need only be familiar with the simple factual knowledge required to follow the manifest narrative content of a dream.

The psychoanalytically trained ethnographer Waud Kracke (1979) disagreed with Róheim, noting that in order to understand what a person's dreams reveal about his or her personality it is necessary to learn the language of dreaming within that individual's culture. Researchers who use a psychoanalytic approach to dreams often combine it with an ethnographic approach to the culture in order to probe both the psychological and the cultural significance of dreams. Visionary or prophetic dreams, for example, often transform the psyche of the dreamer, and they may be a source of inspiration for the founding of new religions and charismatic movements as well as for triggering anticolonialist revolts. Would-be prophets commonly experience revelatory dreams that underlie both their personal access to charismatic power and their spiritual message. Examples include the origins of the Dream and Ghost Dances of Native North America as well as Melanesian cargo cults and Japanese new religions (Michelson, 1923; Burridge, 1960; Fabian, 1966; Worsley, 1968; Franck, 1975; Lanternari, 1975; Stephen, 1979).

Freud's hypothesis concerning type dreams states that the same manifest content—for example, flying, climbing, or the loss of a tooth—reveals identical latent meanings across cultures. Charles Seligman (1923) tested this idea by publishing a request for British colonial officials and missionaries to send him records of native dreams. He believed that if type dreams of the Freudian sort were found frequently in this data base, then the human unconscious was qualitatively so alike worldwide that it constituted a common store on which fantasy might draw. His store metaphor points to the objectifying notion of dream symbolism as a simple trait that might be measured or weighed by colonial officials. It ignores the importance of communicative context both within these cultures and in the negotiation of reality between colonial administrators and indigenous peoples. This lack of sensitivity to the context and manner in which one conducts research is also true for the Navajo research of Jackson Steward Lincoln (1935). He ignored the influence of social setting on his own collection of dreams: transactions that took place at the Black Mountain Trading Post.

While Seligman and Lincoln found that similar sorts of dreams occurred worldwide, the Freudian premise that universal type dreams should mean the same thing everywhere they occurred was never tested empirically until Benjamin Kilborne (1978) asked a group of Moroccan dream interpreters to explain the meaning of a set of fifteen dreams he culled from Freud. Kilborne found that whereas Freud treated dream reports as analyzable structures requiring secondary associations before they could be adequately interpreted, Moroccans did not make an analyzable entity of either the dream or the context of interpretation. Thus in a woman's dream of a deep pit in a vineyard created when a tree was removed, which Freud used as a classic example of a female castration dream, Moroccan dream interpreters focused primarily on the pit, leaving out the tree, or else focused on the tree, leaving out the pit. In the first instance the pit was described as representing a trap for the dreamer, whereas in the second case the tree represented a good person who died. Whereas the Freudian explanation of dream symbols draws on the notion of universal latent content, the Moroccan explanation centers on the dreamer's social position.

Although most dream researchers chose the Freudian path of analysis, a few, including John Layard (1988), Vera Bührmann (1982), and Lawrence Petchkovsky (1984), followed Carl Jung. The sharpest disagreement between the Freudians and the Jungians centers on Freud's hypothesis that the manifest dream is simply a disguise of the latent dream that embodies an infantile erotic wish. Jung (1974) argued that images in dreams reflect the structure of psychological complexes in the personal unconscious that rest upon archetypal cores in the psyche and are subject to the individuating force of the self.

Dreaming encourages a variety of attitudes and responses: pragmatic, cognitive, and spiritual. The pragmatics of dreaming centers on the tactical use of dreams and visions in dream sharing, social interaction, and healing. A cognitive response focuses on expectations concerning the theoretical nature of dreaming and dream interpretation systems together with the languages of dream telling. Spiritual approaches to dreaming combine symbolic, mythic, and ritual elaborations of consciousness. Although these responses overlap, the following sections introduce them one after the other.

The Pragmatics of Dreaming

Deciding which dreams to share, how, and with whom are important issues. Informal dream telling upon awakening with members of one's immediate family is found in all societies. More formal public dream sharing, although it is far less common, also occurs in many places. However, the significance given to the act of dream sharing, whether formal or informal, varies markedly from one society to another. In some societies people place a high value on both the personal and the public use of the many forms of dreaming, including waking dreams, lucid dreams, visions, and nightmares. In other societies dreaming is regarded as insignificant and is given limited importance or even ignored. Epistemological differences between these attitudes toward dreaming are evident when people relate their life stories.

Many Amerindian societies, for example, honor dreaming and construct personal biographies around dreams and visions. The Lakota holy man Black Elk, when he first met his biographer John Neihardt (1932), immediately shared his power dreams with him. Likewise in Chile, when the Mapuche shaman Tomasa first met Lydia Degarrod (1990), she shared her power dreams and visions. In northern California and Oregon there were in the past, and in some cases there remain, organized schools of shamans in which novices shared their dreams with their teachers. After listening carefully to the novices' dreams, the teachers encouraged them to receive specific types of dreams or visions that allowed them to heal patients.

For Mayans in Mexico and Central America it is routine to awaken one's spouse or other sleeping partner in the middle of the night to narrate a dream (Tedlock, 1992, p. 120). Parents also ask their children each morning about their dreams. In most of these societies, even though there may be no recognized dream interpreters, dreams and dream interpretations of respected elders are taken seriously. Children's dreams, while they are always given the benefit of interpretation, have little effect on adult's actions. Other societies urge their children to experience and report certain types of culturally approved dreams and visions that help them to allay anxiety and bring them power and prestige. In yet other cultures parents carefully monitor their children's dream reports lest they begin receiving nightmares. If a youngster receives such dreams, the parents do what they can to alter them by taking the child into the mountains, where they ask that person's spirit to stay away.

The first issue in dream sharing is to categorize the dream as to its type: good or bad, lucky or unlucky. Once this has been decided, a dreamer chooses whether or not to tell the dream. This depends on a combination of personal preference and wider cultural patterns. At Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, for example, the dreams that are immediately told are only those that are considered to be "bad," in that dead people appear and attempt to lure the dreamer to visit the Land of the Dead (Tedlock, 1992, p. 118). The way Zunis prevent the completion of such nightmares is to tell them while inhaling the fumes of a burning piñon branch, then to plant feathered prayer sticks for the ancestors asking them not to appear. If the dream is frightening, the dreamer may even ask for a ceremonial whipping at the hands of a masked ancestral figure. Such whippings remove the bad thoughts and turn them around, reversing their meaning. Good dreams, on the other hand, are not reported until they have been "completed," in other words until they have come true.

Among Quechua speakers in the Peruvian Andes, dreams are premonitory of the day's events (Mannheim, 1992, p. 145). If you experience a bad dream, when you get out of bed in the morning you should step on the left instead of on the right foot. Then before telling anyone your dream, you must find a young sheep or llama and recount the dream to the animal then spit in its mouth three times saying, "Disappear, disappear, disappear."

In China from the earliest times the nature of dreams—whether lucky or unlucky—was considered to be determined by the spirits (Fang and Zhang, 2000). During the Zhou dynasty (c. 1150–256 bce) the emperors practiced rituals to solicit lucky dreams and to avoid unlucky dreams. Texts containing charms to help one avoid bad dreams or turn them into good dreams were eventually written down. The New Collection Zhou Gong's Dream Interpretations (Tang dynasty, c. 618–907 ce), for example, explains that those who have evil dreams should not tell anyone. When they rise in the morning they should instead write on a piece of paper "Red sunshine, the sun rises in the east." If they read this charm three times and place it under their beds, the ghosts will immediately flee.

After a dream is categorized, it can be enacted or interpreted in various ways. Jungians and certain other dream workers regard one's dream images as aspects of the self. Thus all of the symbols within a dream are "translated" into words upon waking and are shared later during an analytic session or dream-group meeting. During this period the dreamer, with the help of the analyst or facilitator, moves into the inner space of the dream and brings out or elaborates the dream events, often amplifying them through mythic or visual similarities, rhymes, or wordplays.

K'iche' Mayans handle their dreams in a similar but slightly different manner. Unlike Western dream enthusiasts, Mayans do not wait for the dream to end to integrate it. Instead they begin during the process of dreaming whenever an important mythic symbol appears. If they miss this opportunity, they wait for a later dream when the symbol recurs in a somewhat different form. At that time the dreamer awakens slightly, cognitively enters the dreamscape, and interrogates each and every symbol as it appears, one after the other, so that each reveals its true nature. This practice, called "completing the dreaming," is similar to both Dream Yoga and lucid dreaming.

Dreaming, Cognition, and Interpretation

The dichotomy between dreaming as an internal subjective reality and waking as an external objective reality, together with a devaluation of dreaming, is an inheritance from the ancient Greeks, most especially from Aristotle. He dismissed dreams as nothing but mental pictures that, like reflections in water, are not the real objects. This idea was elaborated at the end of the Middle Ages, when the notion of the person as having a soul or spirit that could temporarily leave the body during dreaming became heretical. Whereas dreaming was already devalued within the West by the time of the emergence of naturalistic or scientific thought, it was not until the development of Cartesian dualism in the seventeenth century that dreams were firmly placed within the realm of fantasy or irrational experience.

It must be remembered, however, that the irreducible dualism of "spirit" and "matter," which denies the common principle from which the terms of this duality proceed by a process of polarization, was a historical development within Western philosophy. A majority of the world's peoples have not focused their thinking around oppositionalism and thus have not isolated dreaming within the "unreal" realm of spirit. Rather, it is a rationalist proposition that dreaming is somehow a more subjective, false, private, illusory, or transient reality than the more objective, true, public, real, or permanent reality of waking life.

This difference in attitudes toward dreaming is demonstrated by a set of interchanges between Rarámuri Indians living in northern Mexico and the ethnographer William Merrill (1992). Merrill noted that he was frustrated when on numerous occasions people described to him incredible personal experiences but failed to mention that the events had taken place in dreams until he specifically asked. Another researcher living in a Tzeltal Mayan community in Chiapas, Mexico, noted that since dream events were deeply integrated into conscious behavior, it was often difficult for her to decide whether a person was referring to an actual occurrence or to a dream (Hermitte, 1964, p. 183). A third ethnographer who was editing a Tzotzil Mayan's life story reported that she found herself asking him over and over again whether a particular event he was describing occurred in conscious waking life or in a dream while he was sleeping (Guiteras Holmes, 1961, pp. 256–257).

During fieldwork at Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, Barbara Tedlock sometimes found it difficult to tell whether a person was narrating a nighttime dream or a waking experience. When she asked a middle-aged man whether he ever had dreams that foretold the future, he answered: "Yes, awhile back a sheep herder found a dead rabbit, badly torn up, and he cooked and ate it. Later on the man was thrown from a burro, his foot caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged around in some rocks. When his partner found him, he was all tore up, dead" (Tedlock, 1973 field notes).

Instead of narrating one of his own dream experiences, this man related a waking omen. Thus although there are separate terms in the Zuni language to distinguish dreaming from the perception of omens, the fact that the rabbit was eaten in life rather than in a dream seemed to be a matter of indifference to the narrator. Either way, the incident of the rabbit portended the incident with the burro. This blending of waking omens and sleeping dream signs into a single category of premonitions is found more generally among Amerindians.

This remarkable creative potentiality of dreaming occurs because dreams are a way of thinking and of organizing knowledge. At some level all people believe this, as is revealed by the common saying "I'll have to sleep on that decision." At the same time people often profess the belief that dreams are meaningless fantasies or confused mental imaginings with little truth value. This ambivalence arises from the educational system that teaches that only fully conscious rational thoughts can provide true knowledge. Nevertheless people also believe that irrational, or better yet nonrational, unconscious thoughts or intuitions are a sign of "genius."

The Language of Dreaming

It has been suggested that dreaming is the original native tongue, a common language shared by all human beings. However, when discussing dreams, people often neglect the important fact that in any given society the language or languages spoken deeply affect the perception and narration of dreams. Both the structure of the language and its available vocabulary help to channel the imagination of dreamers. Thus within a number of languages, including French, Italian, K'iche' Mayan, and Xavante, the verb stem for dreaming is transitive, indicating that a dreamer acts upon or "makes" something while dreaming. In other languages, such as English, German, Spanish, Zuni, Kalapalo, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the verb stem used to describe the process of dreaming is intransitive, indicating that dreaming is a passive state of being, that one simply "has" or "sees" a dream. This difference underscores the variable attention paid to dreaming as a passive observation by a dreamer and dreaming as an active experience of the dreamer's soul, psyche, or self.

In dream telling a dreamer's source of knowledge or authority as a narrator is also marked grammatically. Wherever dreaming is conceived as involving the actions of the soul rather than of the dreamer's ego, third-person singular forms are used. Epistemological concern with a dreamer's source of knowledge or authority is often marked grammatically. On the Northwest Coast of Canada Kwakiutl speakers use a suffix that indicates that the action of the verb occurred in a dream. There is also another suffix meaning apparently, seemingly, and it seems like as well as in a dream. Since these two suffixes include adverbial and conjunctional ideas possessing a strong subjective element, they are categorized as word suffixes and are placed in a single classification expressing the sources of subjective knowledge. As a grammatical category these suffixes indicating events known only indirectly have been classified by linguists as evidentials. There are several kinds of evidentials—tense particles, adverbs, and quotatives—that require the speaker to adopt a particular stance toward the truth value of an utterance.

The use of evidentials demonstrates major epistemological differences among various traditions. In a number of cultures report forms consisting of verbs as well as particles indicate that the preceding or following utterance is an animation of the speech of a deity, ancestor, or other supernatural. In these examples there is no distinction, as there is in English, between direct discourse that is faithful to the wording and indirect discourse that is faithful to the meaning. Instead, for many peoples there appears to be an irreducible dialectic between linguistic structure, practice, and ideology. It also reveals the existence of separate dream interpretation codes for lay dreamers and professional dream interpreters within the same society. Only people who have been trained as dream interpreters use the quotative.

Psychologists of both psychoanalytic and cognitive bents have read anthropology to compare the dreams of preliterate, tribal, traditional, or peasant peoples with their own findings concerning the dreams of literate, urban, modern, or industrial peoples. This dichotomy, however, denies people living in other cultures contemporaneity with industrial peoples. Instead of using typological time to create and set off an object of study, such as "tribal dreaming," cultural anthropologists have become interested in intersubjective time in which all of the participants involved are coeval or share the same time. This focus on communicative processes among people living in the same time but in vastly different cultures demands that coevalness not only be created and maintained in the field but also that it is carried over during the write-up process. Robert Dentan (1986), while discussing the principle of contraries in which dreams indicate the opposite of what they seem, noted that practitioners of this type of dream interpretation include such widely separated peoples as Ashanti, Malays, Maori, Semai, Zulu, Polish American schoolgirls, and psychoanalysts. In other words Euro-Americans share this principle of dream interpretation with people living in faraway, exotic places.

This underlying sameness in human cognition is also stressed within structuralism. A structural approach to dreaming demonstrates that dreams, like myths, constitute a set of systematic transformations of a single structure consisting of a set of oppositions representing a dilemma or conflict facing a dreamer. Philippe Descola (1989), in research among Jivaroan people in South America, found that the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious are related less by contiguity or universal archetypes than by use of encoding devices for the diversity of reality within elementary systems of relationships. He noted that, like structualists, indigenous dream interpreters emphasize the logical operations through which symbols are connected and suggests that a comparative grammar of dreams is needed that might elucidate how various cultures choose and combine a set of rules or codes for dream interpretation.

The turn away from treating non-Western dreams as totally other, fully knowable objects to be gathered, analyzed, tabulated, and compared with Western dreams toward paying attention to the problematics of dream communication and interpretation worldwide has occurred within anthropology for several reasons. First, ethnographers came to distrust survey research in which "data" is gathered for the purpose of testing Western theories concerning universals in human psychology. Cross-cultural content analysis, in which statistical assertions about dream patterns within particular ethnic groups or genders were the goal, have been critiqued by anthropologists. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that sample surveys aggregate respondents who are deeply distrustful of the researcher with those who are not, as if suspicion made no difference whatsoever in the validity of their replies. Further, a comparativist focus on the extractable contents, underlying structure, or cognitive grammar of a dream report not only omits important phenomena, such as pacing, tones of voice, gestures, and audience responses, that accompany dream narrative performances but is also an expression of the culture of alphabetic literacy and thus is culture-bound.

Another reason for the abandonment of content analysis by most anthropologists is their formal training in linguistics, which encourages them to reject the basic assumption of aggregate statistical research, namely that meaning resides within single words rather than within their contexts. Furthermore dream symbols taken in isolation can be misleading if the researcher has not spent sufficient time observing and interacting within the culture in order to make sense of local knowledge and produce a "thick description" of that culture. Rather than interpreting the language of dream narratives in semantico-referential, context-independent terms, it is more appropriate to utilize context-dependent or pragmatic meaning.

Because of these considerations, researchers no longer set out to elicit dream reports as ethnographic objects to be used primarily as raw data for comparative hypotheses. Instead, since the attitudes toward and beliefs about dreams held by a people reveal important aspects of their worldviews, constructing a detailed ethnography of dreaming has become an important research goal. Ethnographers tape-record and transcribe verbatim dream narratives along with dreamers' interpretations. The method of ethnographic semantics, in which direct and formal questioning is used, may also be applied to ascertain how members of a particular linguistic group categorize their dreams. The goals of this methodology are to produce a taxonomic system of types of dreams, good, bad, true, false, and to reveal native dream theory and techniques of dream interpretation.

This combination of linguistic and ethnographic methodologies, applied within different domains, particularly suits contemporary cultural anthropology, which requires researchers to enter the field for extended periods of time with broad sets of research interests. By living in the community they learn the local language as well as how to interact appropriately, and they are present for various formal and informal social dramas. Sooner or later they are present when a dream is narrated within a family or to a practicing shaman or other dream interpreter. If this event attracts their attention, they make notes about it in their field journals, and they may later record other such occurrences on audio- or videotape. Once they have translated their texts, they may ask the narrator, who may or may not be the dreamer, questions about the meaning, significance, and use of the dream account.

This shift in research strategy from eliciting dozens of dreams as fixed objects to studying naturally occurring situations, such as dream sharing, representation, and interpretation, is part of a larger movement within the human sciences in which there has been a growing interest in analyses focused on practice, interaction, dialogue, experience, and performance together with the individual agents, actors, persons, selves, and subjects of all this activity. A number of new books in the human sciences display this shift from a focus on the dream as an object to the social context surrounding both the personal experience and cultural uses of dreaming (Dombeck, 1991; Parman, 1991; Jʾedrej and Shaw, 1992; Tedlock, 1992; Shulman and Stroumsa, 1999; Young, 1999; Lohmann, 2003).

Dream Sharing

Lydia Degarrod (1990) recorded the majority of her subjects' dreams within a natural setting rather than by arranging formal interviews. During her research in southern Chile with the Mapuche Indians, she gathered dreams and interpretations from members of two families who were coping with serious stress caused by witchcraft and illness. Through dream sharing and interpreting, the afflicted members of the families were able to express their anxieties and externalize their illness, and other family members were able to participate in the healing of their loved ones. Degarrod hypothesized that these types of family interventions were possible due to the general belief that dreams facilitate communication with supernatural beings and due to the nature of the communal dream sharing and interpreting system that allowed the combination of elements from different individual's dreams to be related through intertextual and contextual analysis.

During her research among Australian Aboriginal peoples, Sylvie Poirier (2003) found that dreaming was closely intertwined with religious beliefs. In Western Australia, for example, dreams represent the privileged space-time of increased receptivity among individuals, the environment, and the ancestral world. Through studying local epistemology, she found that not only was the interpretation of dreams open to multiple readings depending on context but that dream experience was also a primary step in the social construction of the person. This sensitivity to the crucial importance of the social and cultural context in understanding and interpreting dreams has been elaborated by historians of religion to include the integration of dream interpretation into the culture's ontological and semiotic maps and the further integration of dream theory into culturally specific notions of personality and economies of consciousness, so that dreaming can be seen in the context of metapsychology (Shulman and Stroumsa, 1999, p. 7).

By studying dream sharing and the transmission of dream theories in their full social contexts as communicative and integrative events, including the natural dialogical interactions that take place within these events, scholars have realized that both the researcher and those who are researched are engaged in the creation of a social reality that implicates both of them. Although ethnographers have long subscribed to the method of participant observation, it still comes as a shock when they discover how important their participation is in helping to create what they are studying. Gilbert Herdt (1992) reported his surprise at discovering the therapeutic dimension of his role in New Guinea as a sympathetic listener to his key consultant, who shared with him erotic dreams that the consultant could not communicate to anyone within his own society.

Likewise the importance of the psychodynamic process of transference, or the bringing of past experiences into a current situation with the result that the present is unconsciously experienced as though it were the past, has only recently been fully realized and described for anthropology. Waud Kracke (1979), during his fieldwork with the Kagwahiv Indians of Brazil, kept a diary containing his personal reactions, dreams, and associations. In an essay discussing these field responses, Kracke not only analyzed his personal transference of his own family relationships to certain key Kagwahiv individuals but also his cultural transference of American values to Kagwahiv behavior patterns.

The Spirituality of Dreaming

Throughout history humans have perceived the visible world of daily living as containing an invisible essence or world of the imagination that manifests in sacred places. This may be located above, below, behind, or alongside of the everyday waking world. Melanesians picture a magical underground mirror world, in Celtic myths the Otherworld lies somewhere in the west, entered through lakes or caves, and in Korean shamanism it lies just across a river from the everyday world. During dreaming, human spirits leave the body and wander in these mythic realms, meeting and engaging with other spirits.

Dreams are perceived as an experience of the shadow, spirit, or soul. As such they are fertile ground for reflection, spiritual growth, and prophecy. Insights derived from dreams have challenged people to deepen and refine their understandings of the sacred. The process of dreaming lies at the heart of shamanism and those religions such as Daoism and Buddhism that have long intermingled with shamanism.

In shamanic cultures dreams allow increased receptivity among persons, ancestors, animals, and indeed the entire natural world. The visible entities that surround one—rocks, persons, animals, trees, leaves—are crystallizations of conscious awareness. The invisible medium between such entities is a dreamlike realm from which all conscious forms emerge. In a number of traditions the rainbow is the outside edge of dreaming, a place where the invisible potentials become manifest, and flashes of lightning are discharges from the depth of dreaming. It is through the nightly experience of dreaming that shamans learn to connect themselves to the cosmos in order to gain knowledge and power.

This shamanic approach toward dreaming is highly developed in hunting-and-gathering societies. When a hunter falls asleep, the spirit detaches itself from the body, tracks and catches a prey animal. The following morning the awakened dreamer goes into the forest to the dream place and gets his or her prey. In far northern Canada hunters explain this ability to communicate with and influence animals as the spiritual practice of "deep hope." They envision this form of dreaming as learning how to untie or lay out a straight mental-spiritual path to the goal of getting meat. In yet another form of dream hunting a person develops an amorous dream alliance with a forest spirit who becomes his or her hunting guide. The spirit falls in love with the dreamer, visiting often in dreams, and enjoys intercourse with the dreamer. This intimate relationship eventually turns the dreamer into a successful hunter. A third type of dreaming involves spirit animals who visit hunters and "sing through them" while they are sleeping, granting them special songs that ensure their later success in hunting. These types of power dreams are sources of spiritual entities, such as divine partners or spouses, attending spirits, companion animals, co-essences, or spirit doubles.

Worldwide there is a close connection between dreaming and shamanic initiation. Essie Parrish, a famous Kashaya Pomo shaman from northern California, told Tedlock one of her earliest power dreams. She was eleven years old at the time she was selected to serve her people as a healing shaman.

As I lay asleep, a dream came to me. I heard a man singing way up in the sky. It was as if the singing entered deep into my chest, as if the song itself were singing in my voice box. Then it seemed as if I could see the man. After I awoke the song was singing in my voice box. Then I myself tried, tried to sing, and amazingly the song turned out to be beautiful. I have remembered it ever since. (Tedlock, 1972 speech to the New School)

In Myanmar (formerly Burma) a young woman dreamed repeatedly of a spirit suitor in human form. After sharing her dreams with her friends, she was encouraged by them to symbolically wed him. As an orchestra played, she performed a special dance and then entered a screened-off area where a group of women shamans waited. One of them moved a mirror back and forth in front of her face, hypnotizing her, while pressing another mirror against her back. A second woman shaman attached cotton strings to her ankles and wrists, placed a longer cord diagonally across her shoulders, and pierced her hair knot with a needle to which a cotton string was attached. As the young woman drifted into sleep, she became both the wife of the spirit and an initiated shaman. From this point onward she was not only in love with and loved by her spiritual spouse, but she also was able to transform herself into his spirit double through appropriate dress and dance gestures (Spiro, 1967, p. 322).

Within Buddhist nations, such as Myanmar, Mongolia, and Tibet, there are both clerical (written) and shamanic (oral) spiritual traditions. Whereas each accepts dreams as spiritually meaningful, the clerical tradition, in which dreaming is primarily used as an aid to achieving enlightenment, holds that dreams are examples of the empty and illusory nature of this world. In the shamanic tradition dreaming leads directly to the esoteric practice of Yoga or lucid dreaming, both of which involve cultivating and controlling one's dreams. Tibetan dream practice combines indigenous shamanic beliefs about the spiritual power of dreams with the Buddhist goal of enlightenment (Young, 1999).

Lucid Dreaming

Within many spiritual traditions the key moment of lucidity is described as the result of an interior dialogue or imaginal conversation between different parts of the self, psyche, or soul. The dreamer is simultaneously cognizant of being asleep and removed from the external world and of being awake and receptive to the inner world. At this crossover point between sleeping and waking there are often complex synesthesias—visual, auditory, and tactile—as the lucid dream emerges from the dream landscape. This new element, which interrupts the imagery and narrative flow of an ongoing dream, fuses dreamer to dreamscape in such a way that it may be experienced as fearful or joyful.

Several methods for achieving lucidity while dreaming are described in the autobiography of the well-known Cahuilla shaman Ruby Modesto (Modesto and Mount, 1980). This remarkable woman spent her adult life as an herb doctor, spiritual healer, and midwife within her home community outside Palm Springs. She explained that directing the course of dreaming, or what is called in her tradition "setting up dreaming," was the most important spiritual practice within her culture. It had been actively sought, used, and taught for generations by shamanic healers.

Dreams and Prophecy

In monotheistic religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, dreaming is closely related to prophetic traditions. The prophet Muḥammad was chosen for his mission late in his life, when the angel Gabriel appeared to him in a dream. The Old Testament records the prophetic dreams of Joseph, the son of Jacob (Gn. 37:5–11), and in the New Testament both the Magi and Mary's husband Joseph are warned in dreams to beware of King Herod. The Magi are warned to return to their country by another route, whereas Joseph is told "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him" (Mt. 2:13).

A widespread type of prophetic dream is the conception dream that parents experience shortly before the birth of extraordinary children. Stories about the birth of Christian and Muslim saints contain many such dreams, which are believed to be signs of divine involvement, sometimes even actual divine fathering. For example, Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, received a dream in which an angel appeared to him saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit" (Mt. 1:20–21). This dream proclaims Jesus' divine origin and encourages Joseph to accept Mary's child as the son of God.

Women also have conception dreams. According to Korean Daoist beliefs, whenever heavenly spirits and those of a woman's body join together and crystallize to make a baby, a dream emerges. One night a Korean woman dreamed that she was bathing in a stream all alone in the moonlight. "I saw a red pepper floating around me. Without thinking, I picked it out of the water, and woke up. Ten months later I had a gentle, though obstinate, boy" (Seligson, 1989, p. 15). In the West during the Middle Ages a pregnant woman's dream was recorded in an eleventh-century text, The Life of Saint Thierry. The future mother of Thierry was disturbed by her dreams and consulted a woman renowned for her gift of interpreting dreams.

She confided her vision, first begging [the woman] to pray for her, so that the vision would not forecast for her an unnatural event, and then begging her to tell her the meaning of the vision. After praying, invested with prophetic grace, [the dream interpreter] said: "Have faith, woman, since what you have seen is a vision coming from God." (Schmitt, 1999, p. 277)

Conception dreams can also be experienced by a fetus while still inside its mother's womb. Desert-dwelling Yuman speakers in the American Southwest remember their earliest dreams from the time they are within their mothers' wombs (Kroeber, 1957). These unborn souls are said to journey to a sacred mountain, where their deceased elders give them special spiritual powers. After the baby is born, he or she totally forgets this prenatal journey, but dreams of the mountain reappear during adolescence. In these traditions all songs, myths, good fortune, and in fact all knowledge itself is derived from dreams. Thus the Mohave and other Yumans are said to interpret their culture in terms of their dreams, rather than their dreams in terms of their culture.

Robert Desjarlais (1991), during his fieldwork in Nepal with the Yolmo Sherpa, noted a large degree of agreement among individuals concerning the meaning of dream imagery and found an implicit dictionary of dream symbolism that individuals relied upon most frequently in times of physical or spiritual distress. In this dream interpretation system the experience of dreaming is believed to have a close, even causal connection with the future life of the dreamer. This principle is also found in many other cultures. However, such interpretations are often provisional. Not all people in a given society place their faith in them, and in some societies only certain individuals are believed to be able to experience prophetic or precognitive dreams. Researchers who have undertaken substantial fieldwork within American society have found that middle-class dreamers also admit to having experienced dreams of the prophetic or precognitive sort in which they obtain information about future events. The Western conception of dreams as predictors of misfortune or success, together with the anecdotal literature on "psychic dreams," indicates that this form of dream interpretation is far from rare in Western societies.

Labeling certain dream experiences prophetic or precognitive, however, does not explain how these and other dream experiences are used within a society. In order to learn about the use of dreaming, researchers cannot simply gather examples of different types of dreams by administering a questionnaire but must interact intensively with local populations for long periods of time. Thus whereas Desjarlais discovered an implicit metaphorical dictionary of dream symbolism among the Sherpa early in his fieldwork, it took him some time as an apprentice shaman to learn the precise way these dream symbols served as symptoms and signifiers both shaping and reflecting distress.

Among the Navajo of the American Southwest and the Maya of Guatemala, as people age their dreams become more and more continuous with waking life, predicting, causing, or expressing events in the world. As a result they no longer clearly distinguish what they discover in dreams from what they learn through direct sensory experience or from other people. Elders sometimes even manipulate their dream narratives to blur the distinction between the present and the mythological past.

Myths and Dreams

Whereas dreams have been described as private, highly fluid experiences and myths as public, fixed linguistic forms, they are actually closely related. Both myths and dreams have a story line that is expressive of an inner emotional-aesthetic structure together with an imagistic, metaphor-rich tapestry of spiritual feeling. Links between dream portents and the events they predict are often made by way of myths. Examples include Daoist practices in ancient China as well as those of contemporary peoples living in the Amazon Basin in Brazil.

For Daoists the appearance of a peach in a dream was an extremely favorable omen, because the Queen Mother of the West loved peaches and invited her favorites to partake of them in order to acquire immortality (Fang and Zhang, 2000). In the Amazon Basin to dream of an armadillo smoked out of his burrow indicates that a kinsman will die, because in a myth a man lures his brother-in-law into an armadillo's home and tries to kill him there (Reid, 1978). On the other hand, to dream of either leaf-cutter ants or a white-lipped peccary entering the house indicates that the person will be killed. This is based on a set of myths in which twin heroes kill their grandmother by transforming leaf-cutter ants into poisonous spiders then create and destroy white-lipped peccaries with thunder sticks (Reid, 1978).

As processes dreams and myths are inversions of one another. Whereas dreams move from sensory imagery to verbal form, myths move from language to sensory imagery. Thus among the Sharanahua of eastern Peru, when shamans elicit dream reports from their patients, they typically consist of single images, such as "peccary" or the "sun," that simultaneously echo myths and overlap with the shamans' categories of songs and symptoms. These thoughts may be shared through "representation" by talking about, drawing, painting, or describing a dream or through "presentation" by reenacting the dream in poetry, song, and dance.

In representational symbolism intentional reference is paramount, the medium of expression is relatively automatic, and inductive reality is paramount. In presentational symbolism meaning emerges as a result of an experiential immersion in the emotional patterns of the dream that is grasped intuitively. Dream workers of various kinds—prophets, gurus, shamans, theologians, and psychoanalysts—use a combination of these techniques to help dreamers engage with the image-filled mythic world of dreaming. It has been noted by healers that in many cultures dramatizations of dreams are a highly effective treatment for disoriented and alienated persons. The psychiatrist Wolfgang Jilek (1982) observed that Northwest Coast shamans who encouraged their clients to perform their dreaming in public are 80 percent effective in healing, compared with the 30 percent effective rate for psychiatrists using the private representational techniques favored by depth psychology.

Some Western dream workers have independently come to a similar conclusion about the presentational power of dreaming. They have noted that because dreams involve an imagistic healing process, it is best if the cogitating mind stays out of the process. Consequently many of them no longer interpret dreams but instead focus on reenacting and reexperiencing the feelings and images of the dream as fully as possible. Others take the position that the healing power of dreaming requires both experiencing, for energy, and interpretation, for meaning.

See Also

Asklepios; Consciousness, States of; Visions.

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Barbara Tedlock (1987 and 2005)