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NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF DREAMING

This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream

research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in
and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and
philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment
on sociohistorical and cultural contexts.
The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection
of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of
settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated with a range
of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of
current anthropological and psychological research, the volume accounts for local
dream theories and how they are situated within distinct cultural ontologies. It
considers dreams as a resource for investigating and understanding cultural change;
dreaming as a mode of thinking through, contesting, altering, consolidating, or
escaping from identity; and the nature of dream mentation.
In proposing new theoretical approaches to dreaming, the editors situate the
topic within the recent call for an “anthropology of the night” and illustrate how
dreams offer insight into current debates within anthropology’s mainstream. This
up-​to-​date book defines a twenty-​first century approach to culture and the dream
that will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as other disciplines such
as religious studies, the neurosciences, and psychology.

Jeannette Mageo is a professor of anthropology at Washington State University,

USA.

Robin E. Sheriff is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of

New Hampshire, USA.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN
THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF DREAMING

Edited by Jeannette Mageo and Robin E. Sheriff

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jeannette Mageo and Robin E. Sheriff;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Mageo, Jeannette Marie, editor. | Sheriff, Robin E., 1959–, editor.
Title: New directions in the anthropology of dreaming /
edited by Jeannette Mageo and Robin E. Sheriff.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013825 (print) | LCCN 2020013826 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dreams–Cross-cultural studies. | Dreams–Social aspects.
Classification: LCC BF1078 .N4525 2021 (print) |
LCC BF1078 (ebook) | DDC 154.6/3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013825
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013826
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47934-​3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47933-​6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​03733-​0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
For dreamers everywhere who share their stories
CONTENTS

List of figures  ix
List of contributors  x
Acknowledgments  xii

PART I
Introduction  1

1 Defining new directions in the anthropology of dreaming  3

Jeannette Mageo

2 The anthropology of dreaming in historical perspective  23

Robin E. Sheriff

PART II
New theoretical approaches to dreaming: implications
for culture and identity  51

3 Metaphors we dream by: on the nature of dream cognition  53

Jeannette Mageo

4 Identity and memory in Germany: the defensive role of dreams  72

Matthew D. Newsom
viii Contents

5 Dreaming bloody murder: women’s dreams of mortal threat,

true-​crime culture, and metonyms of gendered vulnerability  93
Robin E. Sheriff

6 Dream sharing, play, and cultural creativity  114

Kelly Bulkeley

PART III
Dream cultures: theoretical and ontological perspectives  135

7 Out-​of-​body on the happy hunting road: dialogues between

dreaming and culture in Papua New Guinea  137
Roger Ivar Lohmann

8 Taking dreams seriously: an ontological–​phenomenological

approach to Tzotzil Maya dream culture  158
Kevin P. Groark

9 Godly dreams: Muslim encounters with the Divine  183

Amira Mittermaier

10 Life is but a dream: culture and science in the study

of Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming  204
Bruce M. Knauft

Afterword: on the varieties and particularities of dreaming  226

Douglas Hollan

Index  234
FIGURES

3.1 Apple Cup football game. November 23, 2018. Photo courtesy of
Washington State University Marketing & Communications.
Sarah Nathan, Photographer  58
7.1 Yakob village as it appeared in 1995. Photo courtesy of the author  138
7.2 Roger with a tree kangaroo. Outside his ethnographer’s house in
Yakob village, 1995. Photo courtesy of the author  140
7.3 Fugod demonstrating a formerly fashionable way in which men
wore a pig’s tusk through a pierced septum to appear fierce in
battle. Inside Roger’s ethnographer’s house in Yakob village, 1995.
Photo courtesy of the author  140
7.4 How Asabano people (and dogs) sleep.Yakob village, 2017. Photo
courtesy of the author  145
10.1 The current Dalai Lama beneath a thangka of 1000-​armed
Chenrezig, of which he is considered the present reincarnation.
Photo courtesy of the author  211
10.2 Kyabje Sharpa Choeje Rinpoche in front of statues (rupas) of
Chenrezig (center) and Buddha (right). Photo courtesy of the author  212
CONTRIBUTORS

Editors

Jeannette Mageo (Washington State University) is a professor of anthropology. She

is a psychological anthropologist with many publications on cultural psychology in
Samoa and in the Northwest US. She was editor of Dreaming and the Self: New
Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion (State University of New York Press,
for their series on dreaming, 2003), author of Dreaming Culture: Meanings, Models,
and Power in U.S. American Dreams (Palgrave Macmillan, for their series with the
Society for Psychological Anthropology 2011) and has published sixteen major art-
icles on dreaming and culture.

Robin E. Sheriff (University of New Hampshire) is an associate professor of anthro-

pology. A specialist in critical race theory and Latin America, she is the author of
Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (Rutgers, 2001). Her
more recent work focuses on young adult dreaming in the US. She is particularly
interested in the impact of new technologies and media on subjectivity, the larger
problem of consumer culture and consciousness, and theory building in dream
studies that brings together neuroscience and the insights of anthropology.

Additional contributors

Kelly Bulkeley (The Sleep and Dream Database) is director of an online data-
base devoted to sleep and dream research. A former president of the International
Association for the Study of Dreams and a senior editor of the journal Dreaming,
he was originally trained in the psychology of religion, and now combines that
approach with new developments in art, culture, and the digital humanities. He
is author and editor of numerous books, including Big Dreams: The Science of
 Contributors xi

Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Lucrecia the
Dreamer: Prophecy, Cognitive Science, and the Spanish Inquisition (Stanford University
Press, 2018).

Kevin P. Groark (Macquarie University) is a lecturer in anthropology. He is a med-

ical and psychological anthropologist with extensive postgraduate training in psy-
choanalysis. He has worked in highland Chiapas with Tzotzil-​speaking Maya since
1991, focusing on emotion culture, ethnopsychology, dream experience, intersub-
jectivity, and cultural psychodynamics.

Douglas Hollan (University of California, Los Angeles) is a professor and Luckman

Distinguished Teacher in the Department of Anthropology. He is also a senior
member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is a psycho-
logical and medical anthropologist whose primary focus is on how social experi-
ence affects health and well-​being (including mental and emotional health) and
different states of consciousness (including sleeping and dreaming). He is co-​editor
of The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies
(Berghahn, 2011)

Bruce M. Knauft (Emory University) is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology.

Author of nine scholarly books and edited collections, Dr. Knauft has conducted
research in Melanesia, West and East Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and in a dozen
trips to countries of the Altai-​Himalayas. In recent years, he has developed increasing
interest in Tibetan Buddhist practices, both in the Himalayas and as disseminated
to Western countries including the US. His theoretical interests encompass many
issues concerning subjectivity, cultural representation, and sociocultural change and
transformation.

Roger Ivar Lohmann (Trent University) is an associate professor of anthropology.

He came to the study of dreams as part of his research on experiences that con-
vince people to believe in supernatural beings and forces. He is the editor of Dream
Travelers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and the author of numerous ethnographic and
theoretical publications on the relationship between dreams and culture.

Amira Mittermaier (University of Toronto) is an associate professor in the

Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Anthropology. She is
the author of Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University
of California Press, 2011) and Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times
(University of California Press, 2019).

Matthew D. Newsom (Washington State University) is a PhD candidate in the

Department of Anthropology. He spent two years in Berlin, Germany, where he
conducted fieldwork on dreams, collective memory, subcultures, gender, and iden-
tity. His research interests also include human migration and mental health.
newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dream studies in the new millennium offer a fertile opportunity for exploration. As
dreamers the world over share their nighttime adventures through new technolo-
gies and media; as social, political, and cultural change accelerates across the globe;
and as the sciences advance new methods and raise new questions, anthropologists
are well-​placed to take account of dreaming and its complex relations with the
social worlds in which dreamers live. All of the contributors to this volume embrace
the insight that dreams comment on the social surround and they do so from an
intimate angle that illuminates the ever-​thorny problem of how to theorize the
bridge between individuals and their changing cultures. This volume emerged out
of exciting work and conversations begun at a panel at the meetings of the Society
for Psychological Anthropology in Santa Ana Pueblo in April, 2019—​conversations
that continued at the joint meetings of the Canadian Anthropology Society and
the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver in November 2020.
At Routledge, we would like to thank Katherine Ong and the two anonymous
reviewers for their enthusiastic encouragement, and Stewart Beale for his editorial
assistance. We thank Matthew Newsom for producing the volume’s index. We are
grateful to Washington State University Marketing and Communications for the
photograph that appears in Chapter 3. Finally, we note that our names, as editors,
are listed alphabetically; we contributed equally to the volume’s production.
PART I

Introduction
1
DEFINING NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF DREAMING
Jeannette Mageo

As new research on dreaming among cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and

philosophers of mind emerges, and as anthropologists investigate dreaming in ever
more diverse sites, this topic is in urgent need of updating. New Directions takes
account of work in anthropology and beyond to define a twenty-​first century
approach to culture and the dream. This volume demonstrates that the time is ripe
to re-​present the topic in a way that is compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines
and to illustrate how dreaming offers insight into current debates and problems
within anthropology’s mainstream.
Anthropologists have long investigated power relations evident in discourse and
implicit in ideologies. One new direction this volume takes is defining the role of
dreaming in this investigation. Nightly, dreams dramatize our most profound and
troubled encounters with the sociocultural and political worlds that coerce and
exploit us. More recently, anthropologists have been concerned with the (suffering)
subject. Dreams are descents into unguarded experience—​into preoccupations,
questions, fears, wishes, and mental wanderings. Hence, they give special access to
lived subjectivity in particular historical moments. Dreams have tales to tell about
what it feels like to be a person in fluid, shifting, cultural constellations and multi-
farious cultural realities.
Dreaming, in our view, is ever engaged with the social and political, yet it is best
understood as the subjective pole of culture—​often more personal and more deeply
lived than waking life. In waking, thoughts and feelings are routinely concealed
and belied but also predicated by polite and normative surfaces and routines. In
dreams, one sees the underside of daily cultural life played out on an inner stage.
While our contributors continue to investigate classically psychoanalytic questions
about the internalization of social authority, they replace psychoanalysts’ exclu-
sive concern with an insular psyche with a more social and collective perspective.
Our aim is not to reproduce the techniques and goals of psychotherapy, but to
4 Jeannette Mageo

use dreams to better understand what it means to be a person in other psycho-

logical economies.Yet, a number of chapters suggest that emergent anthropological
perspectives on the dream have important implications for the nature and execution
of psychotherapy–​–​namely, that therapies must take account of how culture colors
and structures emotional problems and how people in culture are ever entangled in
what Geertz (1973), following Weber, famously called “webs of significance.”
New Directions adds a new dimension to recent discussions of the “ontological
turn” in anthropology. Our dream ethnographies reveal what it is actually like to
live in ontologically distinct worlds, as well as the implications and complications
of doing so. Pursuing this line of inquiry we ask: what is cultural in the ways social
life compels people and precisely how do internalized cultures compel them? How
do cultural realities inspire defenses and enthusiasms such that we establish our life
courses through them? How do dreamers confront ambivalence-​generating polit-
ical situations? Dreams are as integral and telling a part of cultures as waking life.
They point not only inward but also outward and force us to follow. This is why
dreaming belongs at the center of anthropological research, not the margins.
Our new directions are also methodological. Unlike researchers dedicated to
narrowly quantitative methods, we collaborate with individual dreamers to explore
their mental and emotional conflicts in dreams. Contributors to this volume no
longer assume, as was true for earlier anthropological dream studies going back
to Lincoln (1935), that dreamers cannot know what their dreams are really about.
We continue to have an interest in symbols and metaphors, but we do not wield
expert authority over our informants. We take informants’ insight seriously, just as
anthropologists do in waking-​life fieldwork. We credit informants’ ability to mean-
ingfully consider a dream’s significance and to speak authoritatively about their social
and cultural sources, bringing an ethnographic ethics and reflexivity to our analyses.
We learn about informants’ dreams and their culture at our informants’ knees.
Mittermaier (Chapter 9), for example, takes the subordinate position vis-​à-​vis
Sufi shaykhs. Lohmann (Chapter 7) engages in dialogues about dreams wherein
Fugod teaches him about his people’s emergent understandings of Christianity.
Sheriff (Chapter 5) learned about American-​media murder culture when she started
interviewing informants who were avid participants in it. Newsom (Chapter 4)
discovers what it is like to grow up in contemporary Germany from dreamers and
watches them grapple with the moral and affective legacies of World War II. Knauft
(Chapter 10) studies how to be a Buddhist and how to dream according to ancient
pathways. Julio shows Mageo (Chapter 3), a white woman, what it is like to be a
young male Hispanic in the contemporary US. Shamans teach Groark (Chapter 8)
how one develops authority among the Chamula Maya. Bulkeley (Chapter 6)
initiates an art-​dream workshop and all the art that follows comes from collective
synergy; it is a surprise that participants feel their way through. Anthropology is
unique among the social sciences in letting the field and informants define, if not
the object of study, the terms and experiences through which it is considered. We,
therefore, propose a more dialogical approach to dream studies, one that may be of
use to scholars of dreaming who work in other disciplines.
 Defining new directions 5

A topic of perpetual concern to those who study actual dreams is the distinction
between dreams-​as-​dreamt and remembered/​reported dreams. How do dreams
transform from a person’s internal experience to a narrative that then becomes a
subject of interpretation? Without situating the dream in the cultural context of its
telling and identifying the role of the interlocutor in shaping the dream narrative,
one runs the risk of not adequately making this distinction. Psychoanalysts dis-
cuss this distinction in terms of transference and countertransference. Transference
and countertransference refer to feelings that psychoanalysts believe move uncon-
sciously back-​and-​forth between analyst and analysand. Stretching back to early
childhood, these highly mobile feelings are stirred by psychoanalytic encounters
and re-​experienced. Intimate dream narration can also have this effect. Dream
narrators may transfer feelings that took a particular direction and shape in relations
with childhood caretakers onto their interlocutor. But the interlocutor too is drawn
into this displacement and may feel resonant or conflicting emotions that involve
their own childhood dramas and conflicts (countertransference).
There is much of interest in the ideas of transference and countertransference.
For one thing, these ideas suggest that dreams are never insulated from interlocu-
tory exchange with the social world. Thus, transference may affect or even gen-
erate the dream-​as-​dreamt, which is then “addressed” in a Bakhtinian sense to the
dreamer’s interlocutor. Transference and countertransference predicate that the
dream is intersubjective all the way down. Under the spell of transference and
countertransference, however, both parties tend to see analysts as parent figures.This
illusion may persuade people that their interlocutor inevitably “knows” what the
dream is about and what the teller is experiencing. In contrast, the new ethic, which
our chapters explicitly demonstrate, surrenders authority and the parental position.
We subvert the old Freudian notion that the person who tells the dream is somehow
subordinate. Rather, we regard dreams as cultural artifacts that anthropologists and
informants unearth and explore together. Dreamer and interlocutor have access to
important but different sources of information about the significance of a dream.
Dreamers know about their own experience, personal history, and their culture.
Anthropologists, too, know about a dreamer’s culture, but also about cross-​cultural
comparisons, and they know cultural theories on everything from power to cogni-
tive theories about schemas and models. Such sources, we believe, need to dovetail
in valid dream interpretation.
Our contributors employ analytic strategies pitched at a variety of levels and
present ethnographic research from broad ranging locales—​from ultra-​modern
metropoles to remote rural locales where indigenous ontologies confront ever-​
encroaching global capitalism. While all chapters draw heavily on dreamers’ voices
in their accounts, some focus more on new theoretical approaches to dreams and
others on accounts of local dream beliefs and practices.When making such accounts
the ethnographer draws out the implications of dreaming in other cultures for new
theory building. In this sense, this book bridges emic and etic foci that map, if only
roughly, onto the West-​versus-​the-​Rest categories. Mageo (Chapter 3), Newsom
(Chapter 4), Sheriff (Chapter 5), and Bulkeley (Chapter 6) offer etic theories of the
6 Jeannette Mageo

dream, while Groark (Chapter 8), Mittermaier (Chapter 9) and Knauft (Chapter 10)
unpack local dream theories. Lohmann, a liminal case (Chapter 7), theorizes the
collision of Western/​Christian and traditional Papua New Guinea cultures.1
Connected to these divergent foci is a contrast between collective dream
cultures, as among Muslims, versus cultures in the West that credit the presence of
generally invisible and individualized dream experiences. In dream cultures, people
often see dreaming as offering correcting perspectives on waking life and as usefully
envisioning what is opaque to the waking mind. Then dreaming is visioning and
is central to religious experience—​to interactions with God and other numinous
beings and essences, as in Knauft’s, Lohmann’s, Mittermaier’s, and Groark’s chapters.
In Western cultures dreaming tends to be peripheral to waking life and is a secular
province mainly of therapists, theorists, and experimentalists. Bulkeley’s comment
(Chapter 6) that “cultural forces can nurture dreaming or stifle it” is apropos here.
Also implicit in these divergent cultural orientations is a contrast in ways the
dream itself is constructed and understood. In the West, there is a lingering ethno-
centric reification of “dreaming” as distinct from and opposed to “waking,” which
Westerners have also challenged in sources from Plato’s myth of the cave to The
Matrix and Westworld. Sheriff (Chapter 5) shows that dreaming makes little to no
distinction between what is seen on television and what is experienced in “real” life.
In his discussion of lucidity among Tibetan Buddhists, Knauft (Chapter 10) reminds
us that dreaming is not necessarily a distinct and unified phenomenon in oppos-
ition to waking life, but is rather a series along a continuum of states. He asks what
is real and what is reification in Western assumptions about dreaming in light of
the Tibetan idea that dreaming is a space where one can move toward higher states
of consciousness, and how this Tibetan idea intersects with recent psychological
studies of dreaming as a form of consciousness (see also Laughlin 2011). Lohmann
(Chapter 7) points out that many dream beliefs and experiences posited by local
theories of dreaming, such as the idea that they are “sensations of hidden reality,”
are more common cross-​culturally “than is the scientific model of dreams as purely
imaginary” (see also Groark, Chapter 8; Stephan 2003).
If certain contrasts among our chapters are evident, our various investigations all
point to a powerful new view of dreaming. Constitutive to this view are three pri-
mary directions that this introduction now reviews in more depth and in individual
essays, drawing out their implications for a twenty-​first-​century anthropology of
the dream. It also attempts to define what these overriding directions bring to
dream studies in anthropology and other disciplines.

Dreams and culture change

Since the mid-​twentieth century anthropologists have argued that dreams register
and advance cultural change (see for example Eggan 1952, 478–​79; Wallace 1956;
Stephen 1979, 1995; Tedlock 1992). Yet dreams remain a neglected resource for
investigating and understanding change. This volume credits dreaming with start-
ling and trenchant social commentaries that often go unspoken in waking life.
 Defining new directions 7

These implicit visual commentaries reveal the undersides of culture—​the side ripe
for revolution, from affective revolutions to political ones. Dreamers often express,
explore, and critique problematic dimensions of culture (unfairness, inequality,
contradictions, impossible expectations, unrealistic ideals, false beliefs, hypocrisy,
immorality parading as custom, etc.) that waking-​life interactions may obfuscate,
silence, or rhetorically erase. Mageo (Chapter 3), for example, analyzes the dream
of an American Hispanic, Julio. Julio fights and tries unsuccessfully to outrun an
American race–​sports–​masculinity constellation and desperately seeks what a pro-
ductive relationship to the culture might be for him. Newsom (Chapter 4) recounts
the dreams of young Germans who struggle to confront the Nazism and racism of
their national past, which had gone socially underground to a degree until recently,
yet is still present. Sheriff (Chapter 5) focuses on the dreams of young female
college students in the Northeastern US—​dreams that raise questions about the
profit-​generating mediatization of violence and domination against women that
is so taken for granted in American culture. Lohmann (Chapter 7) documents the
dreams and dialogues of his Papua New Guinean informant, Fugod. Fugod had
recently converted to Christianity, escaping local fears of witchcraft and ghosts.
Groark (Chapter 8) show how Tzotzil Maya dreams disclose that people’s civil and
polite public behavior is often a mask behind which they compete and scheme
against one another.2
Investigating and theorizing about individuals, psychologists have long seen
dreaming as an integral part of learning and as performing “memory consolidation”
(see for example Bion 1992; Foulkes 1993; Hartman 1998; Hunt 1989; Palombo
1978; Stephen 2003; Stickgold et al. 2001; Stickgold and Walker 2004). Cultures
are our collective learning and memory systems (Mageo 2010, 2011; Lohmann
and Dahl 2013). Various chapters in this volume, too, show that dreaming does
similar work for us collectively as it does for people individually, helping people to
learn, remember, and change by integrating daily experience within larger cultural
structures that may falter in a particular life confrontation or historical moment—​
particularly, perhaps, this new global historical moment. Dreamers in this volume
thrust us assertively into a global world of incredibly rapid change. Newsom’s
dreamers, for example, mull over the rightward, fascist lurch happening all over
Europe, the US, and swaths of South America. These German dreamers, however,
also adopt new identities as global citizens and build community across borders—​a
radical political act.
Stephen (2003) discusses dreams as extra-​semantic perceptions. What she means
by this term is that our senses and our linguistic minds speak different and incom-
patible languages, yet sense impressions that are not easily verbalized can often be
represented in images. Hence a level of perception subtler than our languages can
codify may appear in dreams. It seems likely that hunting and gathering peoples
with simple technologies needed such perceptions to survive—​anticipating the
likely location of game, for example, through barely detectible signs. Indeed, still
today such peoples often see their dreaming as offering this kind of information
(see for example Willerslev 2004). Perhaps now, when the future of the species so
8 Jeannette Mageo

obviously hangs in precarious political and ecological balances, we may again need
the extra-​semantic perceptions of dreams to navigate all that impends globally.
Dreams sometimes serve as psychological preambles and internal precursors
of global events. Mittermaier’s Egyptian Muslim informants (Chapter 9) dream
about God, which according to some religious authorities they are not supposed
to do! One might speculate that this subtle change was an internal preamble to
the Arab Spring and, going further, one might see the Arab Spring as an animating
precursor of the global Occupy movement. Lohmann’s dreamers (Chapter 7) get
sucked through their outward-​pointing dreams into global Christianity—​long a
key part of an intensified moment of Western imperialism that has gone hand-​in-​
glove with the aggressive resource extraction in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Groark’s Chamula Maya (Chapter 8) engage paradoxically with glo-
balism. They have a reputation for hostility to tourists who take photographs of
public ceremonies or in churches and they exert strong control over the access of
visitors to their community, yet shamans communicate with spirits/​God via oneiric
smartphones—​the very symbol and epitome of the virtual and global. Mageo’s
Julio and his dreams (Chapter 3) lean into the future, toward the cusp of what
later develops into a new era of American People of Color (POC) activism, today
greeted by backlash and Trumpism. Knauft (Chapter 10) documents authentic
Tibetan Buddhism in the American south. Here the internationalist, done-​with-​
Christianity experiments of the Beats and the Beatles go mainstream with Knauft
as an autoethnographer. Bulkeley’s dreamers (Chapter 6) are part of a global crisis
in migration and remind us of the same rightward lurch evident in Newsom’s
Germany (Chapter 4). Sheriff ’s dreamers (Chapter 5) ride the wave of new pros-
thetic technologies and media productions—​Pandora’s global-​box of Netflix and
the iPhone. While her dreamers appear as victims, the new figure of the female
detective/​forensic scientist/​cop/​radio host also inspires their engagement with the
murder genre.
Cognitive anthropological theory about schemas and models plays a role in
accounting for change in a number of chapters. In her essay in this volume and
in a long series of publications,3 Mageo argues that in the metaphorical play of
dreams, people confront otherwise unconscious discontents with cultural models.
Discontents drive dreamers to work on collective problems of meaning and inspire
similar resistances and cultural innovations in others’ dreams. Lohmann (Chapter 7)
also argues that major changes in people’s understanding or worldview may dis-
rupt interdependent cultural schemas. Dreams, he argues, register and even gen-
erate an updating process through a “natural dialogue between waking and sleeping
thought.” For Lohmann, this dialogue is “natural” in the sense that dreams are
neurobiological processes and in this limited sense their origin is biological. Here,
I would add, “dialogue” is a trope drawn from social life and indeed, biological and
social signals often trigger one another. After all, it was a bell that made Pavlov’s
dog salivate.
Dreams can work on troubling schemas and models because images and motifs
that serve as visual metaphors for them travel into dreams via what Mageo (2001b,
 Defining new directions 9

2002a, 2011) calls a culture’s “narrative spectrum.” Narrative spectrums consist of

all narratives circulating in a culture at a point in time and run from the seemingly
disordered, spontaneous stories we dream, to gossip and life histories, to popular
entertainments like film, television, and video games, to written and oral literatures,
to theater, to the highly conventional stories like founding myths that elders or
statesmen evoke in public oratory. Stories on this spectrum migrate. Public stories
may enter dreams often in fragmented forms, and personal tales like biographies
and dream accounts enter public media in venues from theater to politics, carrying
new learning for experimentation and incorporation (Mageo 2002a, 2011, 23–​
58). In this vein, Sheriff (Chapter 5) observes that murder movies with female
victims move into the dreams of American female undergraduates and Newsom
that the dreams of young Germans recruit travel tales and their associated motifs
from their waking-​life as a way of distancing dreamers from burdensome and con-
fusing historical guilt.
Winnicott’s (1971) idea of “transitional realms” casts light on this movement
along the narrative spectrum. Transitional realms, for Winnicott, help little ones
bridge inner worlds and outer ones: in play infants and then children recognize
reality by playing with its disconcerting aspects, recreating these in their own terms
much like Freud’s little nephew did in the famous Fort/​Da game (1964). Points
on the narrative spectrum lie at different removes from inner worlds and public
ones. Translating a dream into a language and into a culture’s narrative practices
inevitably moves it further toward the public world. Forms of dream play (see for
example Bulkeley Chapter 10; Graham 1995; Mageo 2001a; Tedlock 1981) and
dream analysis, too, weave a dream into public culture. Yet all points along the
narrative spectrum have a transitional potential—​a potential to serve as a space
for considering and transforming relationships between the person and the social
(see also Bulkeley 1999). Indeed, Bulkeley (Chapter 6) argues that dreams are
play and as such inherently creative and that “cultural change grows out of the
adaptive creativity at the core of the dreaming process” (see also Globus 1989, 3–​62;
Glaskin 2015, 2011).
Changes in meaning systems through dreams point to confrontations and
integrations with cultural pasts illustrated in Mageo’s (Chapter 3) analysis of Julio’s
dream struggles with American racial history personified in his dream by skeletal
detectives (see also Mageo 2001a, 2002a, 2003a). Newsom (Chapter 4) argues that
in dreams young Germans wrestle with what one might call the closeted skeletons
and buried or unburied dead of World War II.Today dreams process ongoing change
in an era of rapid global transformation—​as capitalist modes overtake traditional
modes, as cultures of consumption and communication media spread, and as various
groups struggle for ways to respond to new modernities. Drawing on her research in
Egypt since the early 2000s, Mittermaier (Chapter 9) argues that Egyptian Muslims’
dreams respond to modernity by re-​entrenching dreamers’ oneiric sensibilities in
religious tradition. In Groark’s chapter a Tzotzil-​Mayan cellphone ordination dream
is a wonderful example of the oneiric interleaving of traditional and modern cul-
tural elements in dreams and of doing psychological–​historical work that articulates
10 Jeannette Mageo

indigenous peoples with global symbols and processes. Similarly, Lohmann’s Papua
New Guineans (Chapter 7) interleave indigenous Pacific and Christian-​mission
traditions. Sheriff ’s students (Chapter 4) ride the wave of shifting media ecologies
and wrangle with “ever-​changing cultural landscapes of meaning.” All of Mageo’s
work on dreams, including Chapter 3, is about how people cope with changing and
contradictory culture.4 In spelling this out, New Directions demonstrates very vividly
why and how dreaming is profoundly cultural—how the dreaming mind is a cul-
tural organ—​or as Lohmann (2019, Chapter 7) says, dreaming is culture.
Change is also transition and speaks to cultural processes that affect social and
individual transmutation. Here again we take inspiration from Winnicott’s (1971)
idea that dreams are a transitional space between the internal world of the sub-
ject and the “real” external world—​between desire and what exists. Documenting
Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about the dream, Knauft (Chapter 10) tells us that
dreaming is one of many bardos, transitional states that are integral to the way
Tibetan Buddhists conceptualize existence. Bulkeley’s (Chapter 6) idea of dreaming
as play revolves around Winnicott’s object-​relations approach to the imagination
as producing “transitional phenomena.” Dreaming is a transitional space of spe-
cial import for young people—​a place to rehearse scenes from public culture, as
Sheriff ’s young northeastern dreamers do (Chapter 5). Mageo (Chapter 3) sees
dreams as a space where Julio tries to transit away from his personal past toward
some not yet imagined future, just as he tries to outrun the skeletal detectives.
Newsom’s young Germans would like to transit away from their monstrous his-
torical past. “Christina,” for example, analyzes a dream as representing a conflict
between a sense of self that is tied, on the one hand, to Germany’s Nazi past and her
upbringing in a small German town, and on the other to a newer sense of self that
she has begun to establish through her international travels. Arguably, Lohmann’s
Asabano Christian dreamers (Chapter 7) are trying to make a historical transition to
a contemporary global world and one of its dominant religious worldviews through
their dreams (for further examples see Mageo 2001a, 2002a, 2003a).

Dreams, identities, and alterities

While self-​models are about who the person is, identities concern one’s place in
the social world–​–​banker, baker, or chief.They reflect our relations, or lack thereof,
to our communities and the terms on which we enter into social relationships.
At least since Freud (1964), students of the dream see dreaming as mirroring
the self, albeit more recently the self in changing cultural constellations (Mageo
2003a, 2003c, 2006, 2011, 2015; Sheriff and Mageo 2019; Gaskin 2018). Even
classic Western psychological understandings of the self, however, differ from the
unitary model that Geertz (1984, 126) says Westerners share. In Freud’s (1964)
work, the person consists of discrepant fractious parts (id, ego and superego)
that wear ever-​various faces in dreams. For Jung (1967, 1968, 1970) the person
consists of part-​selves (anima, animus, shadow and other archetypes) that may
be dissociated and personified in dreams. Yet these classic Western theories posit
 Defining new directions 11

an ideal of integration such that one might arrive at a unitary self in the end.
For Freud (1964) consciousness itself is an integrative framework, working out
treaties between often warring territories of the self. For Jung (1967, 1968, 1970)
the various parts of the self represent its unrealized potentials, all of which can
be unearthed through a personal alchemy and transformed so as to ultimately
integrate. For many later researchers too, dreams came to stand for complex if
seemingly inchoate pictures of the unitary person and point toward its realization
through life-​long transitions among an endless series of “self states” (Kohut 1971,
1977) or “selfscapes” (Hollan 2003).5
Today, however, people worldwide, cell phones to their ears, snapping “selfies”
in a multitude of contexts with diverse others, the unitary self wears ironic quota-
tion marks reminiscent of cuckold’s horns: the concept has been stealthily betrayed.
Selves appear as an endless series of identities—​like those that people assume online
or construct through Facebook and other social media. In many non-​Western cul-
tural worlds, too, people model personhood as identities: that is, as shifting and mul-
tiple faces worn in social life in light of which others see the person. New Directions
asks how the theorization of the dream must alter in face of the anthropological
recognition that the unitary self is a cultural construct far from universally shared.6
Dreams, we hold, are not only about the “self,” nor only iterative of unresolved
childhood conflicts that stand in the way of self-​unification. Rather, they are likely
to reflect and advance people’s efforts to reconstitute shifting identities by recon-
ciling new experiences with images and narratives drawn from culture.
Identity is the cumulative result of affirming, “that is me” or “that is not me.”
It develops through acts of identification and dis-​identification with elements of
internal experience and with persons, groups, and manifold kinds of representations
(from discourse to movies to art) in the cultural world (Mageo 1998, 17; Mageo
and Knauft 2002). Successive acts of identification/​dis-​identification occur from
the beginning of life and also occur in dreams. While questions of cultural/​social
contexts and the complex relations they involve are central to identities and their
dream (re)constructions, people often conceive and dream identities in relation to a
contrasting “other.” Implicit in identities, then, are alterities: those dis-​identifications
we make to craft personhood. Alterities in dreams represent actors and feeling at
odds with the dreamer’s conscious sense of self but also provide insight into nega-
tive and resistive forms of agency in a culture—​forms that are more complex than
conscious intent and are what in prior work Mageo (2003b, 2003c, 2011) calls
counter-​identities.We, therefore, ask who is other-​ed in dreams and what role these
alterities play in the cultural reality the dream depicts. What emerges from dreams
for our contributors is a vision of dreaming as a site for contesting, altering, con-
solidating, escaping from, or questioning identity.
Mageo (2017b, 2019a, 2019c) argues that cultural models have correlative
ideals that people realize or fail to realize as social identities (see also LeVine and
Norman 2001). When people fail it is often because they are ambivalent about
these ideals: the person wants but is unwilling to make those identifications from
which a clear sense of identity derives. Such ambivalence, Mageo further argues,
12 Jeannette Mageo

leads to abjection–​–​a negative identity state in which one subscribes to a model as

a form of empty mimicry rather than as a target of sincere imitation and intentional
assimilation. In her chapter, for example, the Hispanic Julio is ambivalent about an
American masculinity model he associates with whiteness and football and that
represent alterity to him. On the one hand, Julio would like to identify with this
model and the culture that it configures in order to belong. On the other hand, he
associates this model with American racism. The result is an inability to say yay or
nay to the model or to deal with his needs for social belonging. Questions of iden-
tity, then, confront the person with issues of power (see also Mageo 2003a, 2003b;
Mageo and Knauft 2002).
Sheriff (Chapter 5) too investigates threats to social identity in dreams. In
American media so many images of young women are idealized in the sense
that they are visually perfect and highly appealing, but in movies and televi-
sion dramas these idealized young women are common targets of male violence.
As in Mageo’s abjection hypothesis, this baleful idealization creates ambivalence,
which in the case of Sheriff ’s dreamers seems to result in identification with
victimization. Sheriff ’s young northeastern women informants suffer nightmares
that end with their murder. This victimization may be a metaphor for abjection
and for impossibly compromised identities: how can one identify with a cul-
tural ideal if it inevitably means one wears, perhaps the latest fashion, but also a
bulls’ eye on one’s back? Shadowy male murderers signify a terrifying alterity in
these dreams—​an alterity that the media suggests is an integral part of American
gender culture. One wonders, what is the way out of such an identity dilemma—​
a dilemma that, surprisingly, Sheriff ’s dreamers seem to embrace: they are avid
fans of murder movies with female victims and call themselves “murderinos.” The
section on dream mentation soon to come considers a possible solution to this
identity mystery.
Also, as in Mageo’s idea of abjection, ambivalence compromises Fugod’s ability
to form an identity (Lohmann Chapter 7). On the one hand, Fugod would like
to identify as a Christian; on the other, he fears abandoning the Asabano’s sprites
and spirit ancestors who give success in hunting upon which his family and
village depend. One suspects that there are personality styles correlated with being
Christian or being a spirit worshiper about which Fugod may also be conflicted,
and different moralities associated with these two religious traditions between
which Fugod would prefer not to choose. In his dream, Fugod experiences vertigo
and slips on a greasy vertical cement road. Cement roads often follow missionary
influxes. It seems likely that this road is a metaphor, therefore, for Fugod’s betwixt
and between situation: he is caught between conflicting belief systems amidst which
he tries to construct an identity. Lohmann shows that Fugod’s dream symbols com-
bine these two traditions, greasing the way for a confluence of apparently contra-
dictory identifications.
In Newsom’s chapter dreams frame identity dilemmas for German dreamers.
Since World War II, Germans have struggled to reconcile collective memories of
violence with a positive sense of personal and cultural identity. Newsom argues
 Defining new directions 13

that while the shape of the Other has changed over the decades since WWII in
Germany, shifting from Jews to immigrants and refugees, tendencies to dis-​identify
with whoever is perceived as other and to blame national identity problems on
them remain the same. For Newsom national identity is inevitably personal.Young
dreamers often respond to their temporal and cultural closeness to their disquieting
past by displacing historical guilt and projecting negative cultural identity images
associated with it on their elders who may have been Nazis. In the global age,
Newsom shows, the past too can become an image of alterity. At the center of his
chapter are questions of how dreamers cope with a stigmatized national/​historical
identity.
For Groark’s Tzotzil-​Mayan dreamers, jockeying for status is at the center of
their local identity concerns and their dreaming. During the day people are cordial
and polite but dreams are a dangerous mirror world where antagonistic others con-
spire against the dreamer. For Groark understanding dream experience is critical
to understanding dynamic tensions between public identities and secret feelings.
Groark, therefore, calls dreams socioscopic: they provide access to normally occluded
realms of human emotion, motive, and action. For the Tzotzil Maya, dreams are an
alternative but legitimate realm of interaction and interpersonal engagement and
people’s dream identities are real and important.Thus Groark shows that among the
Tzotzil Maya, dream experiences can support religious identity formation (see also
Lohmann 2000, 2003). He recounts the case of a curer, Xun, whose divine investi-
ture begins in dreams.
Mittermaier’s portrait of Egyptian Muslim dreams as occasional divine visitations
addressed to the dreamer also makes religious identity immediate and experiential.
In her chapter God and Muhammad are alterities who are profoundly important
to dreamers’ sense of who they are. Anthropologists of religion often remain at a
bloodless conceptual-​level failing to capture this experiential dimension of religion.
Scrutinizing dreams allows Mittermaier to recognize religious identity is achieved
through highly subjective experience, at its core ineffable and numinous, like dreams
themselves. Few anthropologists of major religions take dreams as a component of
religious identity (Paul on the road to Damascus notwithstanding), although dreams
often play a leading role in such identifications in less Western places like among
Groark’s Tzotzil Maya and Lohmann’s Pacific Islanders.
The play that Bulkeley (Chapter 6) believes animates all dreaming is arguably
directed to the negotiation of identity. His chapter zooms in on contemporary
artists who are also immigrants often in flight from political oppression and phys-
ical threat. Their dreams revolve around attempts to manage complex identities
that derive from these histories along with current life difficulties—​like an invalid
grandmother who wants to live at home rather than in a care facility. Together,
Bulkeley and Alisa Minyukova evolved the Dream Mapping Project, dream-​sharing
workshops for these immigrant artists in which they carry on the identity work that
begins in dreams. In a “Dream Character Café” artists use props and costumes to
stage dreams, to assume the identity of dream characters and objects, and to interact
with other people’s dream characters. This work resembles Fritz Perls’s therapeutic
14 Jeannette Mageo

work, Mageo’s (2001a, 2011) Dream Play method of working with dreamers, and
Edgar’s (2004) imagework. The Dream Mapping Project allows these artists to
create alternative identities and to be freer than they can be in normal life where
they are often cast as outsiders and must deal with their host countries’ defensive
feelings about national borders.
For Knauft’s Buddhist dreamers, identity construction amounts to dis-​
identification with the ego. For them, the ego is a spurious self and in a sense an
alterity from which they distance themselves in order to identify with actively
imagined transcendent deities. Recalling and rehearsing these dreams during daily
meditation intensifies identification with the deity essences one has visualized there.
Saṃbhogakāya enlightenment, is a state of full identification with one’s higher nature
as a resonant divine force and with a subtler meta-​conscious level of reality that
recognizes the full interdependence of all beings—​an identification that dreams can
facilitate.

Dream mentation and the cultural imagination

Seeing dreams as intrinsically cultural, this volume offers new insight, critical pur-
chase on, and rapprochements with the cascade of work theorizing dreaming
emerging in fields such as psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience,
and cognitive studies as well as in linguistics and philosophy (see Chapter 2, this
volume). From an anthropological perspective this new work in sister disciplines
shows promise. Rather than conceptualizing the dream as the product purely of
an individual’s psyche, these theorists see dreaming as continuous with waking
social life. Psychologists, however, often conceive of this continuity as simply
personal rather than as intrinsically cultural. In this volume we argue that one
cannot adequately theorize the dreaming mind without understanding how culture
alters our species’ being. In addressing a number of current theories, New Directions
represents a necessary reframing of the relation between culture, personhood, and
consciousness. This reframing is preliminary to bringing work in diverse disciplines
into a unified theory of the dream.
Some contemporary experimentalists reach out to work in other disciplines.
Kuiken et al. (2018, 62), for example, quantitatively investigate the relation between
dreaming and creativity, finding that some dreams have “aesthetic aftereffects”—​
increasing metaphoric creativity and associative fluency. Some contemporary
anthropologists, on the other hand, such as Glaskin (2015, 2011), who works with
aboriginal Australians, explore the relation between creativity and dreaming in
cultural context. Glaskin further argues that advances in neuroscience may help
us understand why and how creativity emerges through dreaming. Much of the
most prominent psychological research, however, remains ripe for cultural critique.
Among current psychological theories of the dream that could profit from a deeper
understanding of culture, the Continuity Hypothesis, Threat Simulation Theory,
and Social Simulation Theory are the most provocative and interesting.
 Defining new directions 15

The Continuity Hypothesis holds that the intensity of waking concerns predicts
the frequency of similar dream events (see Bulkeley, 2018; Domhoff and Schneider,
2018; Foulkes, 1985; Schredl and Hofmann, 2003).7 Dreams, Mageo argues (2019c),
are continuous with waking life by virtue of visual metaphors that in dreams
represent those cultural schemas and models that determine daily concerns and
their intensities. In Julio’s dream (Chapter 3), for example, an American cultural
model of race appears through the cultural metaphor of skin color. This model
has shaped American concerns since before the Civil War. Newsom (Chapter 4)
also disputes that dream continuities are only based in personal concerns, showing
that such concerns may come from social and political history. Sheriff (Chapter 5)
sees dreams as continuous with media environments and the political realities
they reflect, not just with the personal dimension of experience. Indeed, all of
the chapters in this volume argue that dreams are continuous with and extensions
inward of cultural realities.
In Threat Simulation Theory, nightmares evolved to rehearse those threats to
survival that plagued humans in early species history and to practice avoiding these
threats in waking life (Revonsuo 2000, 2006). Social Simulation Theory extends
this theory by postulating that dreams select waking material that allows dreamers
to practice social skills and to rehearse bonds important for species survival
(Revonsuo, Tuominem, and Valli 2016). Offering a potentially unifying theory of
dream mentation, Mageo (2017b, 2018, 2019c) agrees that dreams rehearse threats
and social relations, but she proposes REM-​type dreams (image-​rich story-​like
dreams) do so to think mimetically about all these things. She defines mimesis
as making likenesses with variations, where the iteration of a remembered image
specifies a subject of dream thought, and where variations on this image are com-
mentary on that subject.
In cases of actual bodily threats or of remembering severe trauma, nightmares
do appear to simulate threats to physical being that people seek to avoid in waking
life. Even these threats, however, are wildly different from those of the ancestral
environment—​for example, the threats posed by oppressive political circumstances.
In Bulkeley’s chapter, Alisa’s nightmare replays the physical fear she experienced
in a childhood when she lived amidst highly threatening political conditions,
symbolized in her dream by the KGB. In less fraught and frightful circumstances,
however, Mageo (2017a) argues dreams are more likely to rehearse identity threats
symbolized by bodily threats. In Mageo’s Chapter 3, Julio is attacked by white sports
fans and then killed by skeletal detectives resembling Holmes and Watson; the threat
that these assaults symbolize are to his identity as a young Hispanic male trying to
make his way in a racist society. Dream rehearsals of social relationships, Mageo
(2019a) further argues, repeat and change memory images to think about the cul-
tural and personal past and present.
In Sheriff ’s chapter, too, threats to life and limb do not replay immediate phys-
ical threats to young northeastern women even while they dramatize the vulner-
ability of being female in a world where aggression against women is both real and
16 Jeannette Mageo

a focus of endless mediated fantasy. Rather, murder symbolizes ongoing threats to

making a viable identity in a male dominated society. Sheriff (Chapter 5) agrees
with Revonsuo et al. (2016) that her “murderino” dreamers rehearse sociality.These
dreamers do so, however, by simulating movies in their dreams with female victims
rather than rehearsing actual waking relationships.
Why rehearse victimization? It is true that people rehearse victimization in
dreams after surviving trauma (Hartmann 1998; Lansky and Bley 1995; Lewis and
Krippner 2016; van de Castle 1994), but Sheriff ’s informants have not experienced
trauma in their personal lives, at least not that she reports. Could a chauvinistic cul-
tural constellation function as an ongoing trauma? Possibly, but trauma victims typ-
ically avoid reminders of their ordeals (Kashdan, Morina, and Priede 2009). Sheriff ’s
dreamers are avid fans of movies in which young women are murdered. If these
dream murders symbolize their own trauma living in a chauvinistic culture, then
they would remind dreamers of this trauma and hence they would avoid such movies
while waking even if they dreamt of them repeatedly. These dreamers’ enthusiasm
for female murder movies, then, poses a mystery, one on which McClintock in
Imperial Leather (1995) casts light.
McClintock presents the case of Hannah Cullwick. Cullwick is a working-​class
housekeeper in the mid-​19th century upper-​class household of Arthur Munby.
Munby is obsessed with photographing working-​ class women and Cullwick
becomes his primary subject posing in many guises from a male slave of indeter-
minate race to a Victorian gentleman to an angel, often with a slave band around
her wrist. Munby and Cullwick are lovers and it would be easy to see Cullwick’s
posing as further class victimization, but McClintock sees Cullwick as mining these
images as a way of mastering them and, indeed, she further suggests that Cullwick
is master of the game these two play.
McClintock’s idea of mastery through photographic mimicry is similar to
Mageo’s idea of dreams as a form of mimesis. For Mageo (2017a, 2017b, 2018, 2019b,
2019c) dreams’ mimicry of waking life is a way of visually framing it through repe-
tition but also a way of thinking about it. Recent neuroscience research identifies
“mirror neurons” in our brains that copy and reflect all that we perceive, providing
a basis for learning and relating (Dinstein et al. 2008; Gallese and Goldman 1998;
Keysers 2009; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). We know that human evolution
relied upon imitating others’ adaptive cultural variants (Boyd and Richerson 1987).
It seems likely, therefore, that in evolution the dream functioned as a preserve of
mimetic thinking, making time spent sleeping as potentially useful as waking time.
Synthesizing much psychological and evolutionary research, Bulkeley (Chapter 6)
argues that dreams are play and that play manifests and deeply stimulates creativity.
He hypothesizes that for primates, humans included, play and dreaming as a special
instance of play is most common among the young and tends to rehearse threats
and dangers. Along with Winnicott (1971), Bulkeley sees play and hence the dream
as a safe place to explore threats from inner and outer worlds (see also Mageo
2011). In his “Dream Mapping Project” and in other intersections of dreams and
art (see for example Cecconi 2014), dream sharing extends the playful creativity of
 Defining new directions 17

dreams to social and personal problems. As play often seems near constant among
the young, I suggest that dreams are play’s enduring afterimage in adulthood.
One could further ask: if dreams are play, how is play a form of mentation? On
regarding monkeys at a zoo, Bateson (1972, 179) notes their play resembles fighting
but actually signifies “not fighting”: although they nip one another, they do not
bite. One signifies play, then, by a likeness (nips mime bites) plus a contradiction.
The contradiction arises through subtracting an element from the original: there
is no actual bite. “Play,” in Mageo’s view (2008, 2019a), is also signified by add-
itional contradicting marks. When dogs play “fighting” for example, they often
wag their tails, an additional sign that ordinarily conveys happiness and affection.
Contradicting marks may signify play, but they add up to ambiguity: an image
appears to be itself and not itself. Ambiguity is a signature quality of the dream, one
that exploits the doubling inherent in play by crafting images that have a “not quite”
quality that replicates remembered images with variations. Inherently unstable, such
images precipitate mental play about the copied object.
Lohmann’s (Chapter 7; 2003, 206) interest in dream mentation is in “the rela-
tive balance between sensory and imaginary inputs to awareness” and the “range
of consciousness” that people traverse in waking, sleeping, and various forms of
trance throughout their lives. One could say his informant, Fugod, rehearses and in
this sense mimes in dreams the schemas of traditional culture and mission culture
in ways that help these schemas dovetail and dialogue with one another within his
mind. These rehearsals, then, do cultural work, in this case reconciling seemingly
incompatible models and schemas.9 For Lohmann dream rehearsals also demon-
strate a process that experimental psychologists call “memory consolidation,” in
which recent experiences are replayed and compared with earlier ones.This repeti-
tion allows the interspersing of older and newer images, which Lohmann sees as an
autonomic culture-​updating process (Chapter 7; Lohmann and Dahl 2013).
Rather than offering a theory of the dream per se, Groark (Chapter 8) documents
Tzotzil-​Maya ethno-​theories of persons and the dreams. As what Groark calls “an
attention-​constituted, co-​present realm of experience,” for Tzotzil Maya, dreams are
ontophanic disclosures: dreams disclose an essential reality shrouded by everyday social
identities just as they do in much Western clinical theory. As such, dreams offer
access to social knowledge and self-​understanding. As for Mageo (Chapter 3, 2010)
and Lohmann (Chapter 7), for Groark dreams effect cultural internalization in the
sense that “culturally constituted realities come alive for individuals, providing vis-
ceral and immediate experiences of otherwise abstract cultural norms, beliefs, and
beings.” One can see this ability of the dream—​to constitute otherwise abstract cul-
tural models as an immediate and highly compelling virtual reality—​in many of the
chapters in this volume. Julio’s dream (Mageo Chapter 3) stages and hence offers an
opportunity to think through American racism, Newsom’s young German dreamers
(Chapter 4) live the Nazism of the past as a family drama, Sheriff ’s murderinos live
male chauvinism in the most vivid terms possible, Lohmann’s Fugod lives in his
two cultural–​historical worlds combined in one dream reality, and Mittermaier’s
dreamers gain visceral and immediate experience of an Egyptian model of God.
18 Jeannette Mageo

Dreams demonstrate that culture is the axis on which our evolutionary adap-
tation as a species turns. Probably adaptable brains, malleable cultures, and dreams
all co-​evolved (Muthukrishna et al. 2018). As social realities keep changing in deep
and recent human history, dreaming has been a space in which to consider, craft,
and practice novelty of all sorts. But in dreams as in waking life, people shape their
own personal and collective evolution: they respond inventively to inevitable problems
with their social enterprise, actively forging the fate of societies and of the species
as this endeavor plays out in individual lives and dreaming imaginations. Human
dreaming is a natural outcome of the plasticity and flexibility of culture. Along with
Revonsuo et al. (2016), then, this chapter calls for an evolutionary understanding of
dreaming, but beyond that for the resituating of theory building in this area within
four-​field anthropology, where it belongs. New Directions points to missing links or
at least to ways of bridging qualitative and quantitative approaches to dreaming that
can help social scientists illumine dynamic interplays among neurobiology, cogni-
tion, sociality, and culture.

Acknowledgments
I thank Robin Sheriff for the many ideas, insights, phrasings, and references she
contributed to this chapter and Stanley Smith for his useful editorial comments.

Notes
1 On the collision of Western and Pacific cultures in dreams see also Mageo 2001a, 2002a,
2003b, 2004.
2 On dreams and history see also Stewart 2004, 2017 considered in Chapter 2.
3 On people grappling with their problems with cultural schemas and models in dreams see
further Mageo 2001a; 2002a; 2003b, 2003c, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2013b,
2015, 2016, 2017b, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c.
4 On how people cope with changing and contradictory culture in dreams see further the
publications mentioned in Note 3.
5 For summaries of this literature see also Hollan 2003; Mageo 2003c.
6 See for example Dumont 1966; Fogelson 1982; Harris 1989; Kondo 1990; Levy 1983;
Mageo 1998, 2002b; Markus and Kitayama 1991; Mauss 1985; Shweder and Bourne
1984.
7 Bell and Hall (1971) originally presented this theory.Theorists’ views on the nature of this
continuity differ (see for example, Domhoff 2017; Erdelyi 2017; Schredl 2017).

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2
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DREAMING
IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Robin E. Sheriff

Among the recurring, lifelong experiences universal to all humans, dreaming

remains the most mysterious. It is, in this sense, simultaneously commonplace
and something of a last frontier in the human sciences. Driven by physiological
mechanisms still incompletely understood and susceptible to a vast range of cultural
elaborations, dreaming straddles neurological, social, cultural, historical, and evolu-
tionary dimensions of the human condition. Because it is the most epistemolog-
ically slippery and strange of human experiences, dreaming seems to plunge into
the wild and weird side of anthropology. Yet dreams are unquestionably cultural
products and an exercise of human social cognition. Because dreaming is so intim-
ately interdigitated with the economic, social, linguistic, symbolic, and ontological
bases of culture, dream studies necessarily engage with topics that are foundational
to the discipline of anthropology—​and contribute to discussions that break new
ground.
Our collective argument in the volume is that dream studies should travel from
the discipline’s margins to its center.They illuminate perduring questions about the
processes by which individuals, imaginative capacities, and dynamic cultures co-​
create the human world. In reviewing more than a century of scholarship, I dem-
onstrate the historical depth and breadth of anthropologists’ engagement with
dreaming in diverse cultures.1 The following sections consider research over three
chronological periods: the first extending to the early 1960s, the second covering
the latter decades of the twentieth century, and the third focusing on dream studies
since the new millennium. In a concluding section, I suggest some of the ways
that current and future work in all four fields of anthropology might produce a
more multidisciplinary, holistic, and cohesive conversation about the significance of
dreaming in human lifeworlds.
24 Robin E. Sheriff

Early dream studies: psychoanalysis and salvage ethnography

Prior to the professionalization of the discipline, many of anthropology’s leading
lights were deeply concerned with dreaming. Operating within the evolutionary
paradigm of the day, Edward B. Tylor speculated that dreaming was the origin
of all religious thought. He argued that indigenous peoples “hold [animism] on
the very evidence of their senses” (1871, 451)—​meaning their dreams, where they
encountered the dead as well as all manner of spirits. Tylor also urged the investiga-
tion of local theories of dreaming, seeing them as critical to cross-​cultural research.
These views found their way into multiple editions of Notes and Queries (British
Association for the Advancement of Science 1874), an early manual for profes-
sional ethnographers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Herbert Spencer
(1898) also speculated on the role of dreaming in evolutionary terms, arguing that
dreaming gave rise to the notion of self. “The hypothesis of mind as a distinct entity
cannot exist before the experiences suggesting it; the experiences suggesting it are
the dream-​experiences, which seem to imply two entities,” he wrote (1898, 143).
Prior to Freud, then, early social theorists identified dreaming as a critical experi-
ence informing foundational aspects of being human.
When Freud’s Die Traumdeutung was published soon after C. G. Seligman and
W. H. R. Rivers completed the Torres Straits expedition, both became devoted,
if critical converts. Critiquing Freud’s Totem and Taboo in a 1918 lecture, Rivers
argued that Freud’s analogical treatment of myth and dreaming was less compel-
ling than the “far larger problem concerned with the psychological relations of
the dream to human culture in general” (1918, 388). He maintained as well that
“desire” was but one of “the affective states to which dreams are due” (1918, 391).
In a series of lectures published posthumously as Conflict and Dream (1932), Rivers
argued that dreams were less a form of wish fulfillment, as Freud maintained, than
attempts to “solve in sleep conflicts which are disturbing the waking life” (1932,
137). Seligman (1923) called for colleagues in the field to collect dream narratives
and their local interpretations and in a 1932 lecture, outlined a case for anthropo-
logical attention to “unconscious processes”—​best studied through dreams—​which
he believed should have a central place in the emerging discipline. In a mono-
graph on dreaming, Reo Fortune (1927) also adopted some Freudian concepts but
critiqued others. Postulating a systemic relation between dreaming and culture, he
ventured that dreams were a space in which individuals could creatively disagree
with “herd” thinking.2 These early theorists, then, speculated that dreaming puzzles
through social problems and critiques public culture.
During and after the war years, English-​trained anthropologists carried Freudian
models into the field. During his storied visit to the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski
queried men about their erotic dreams. Their dreams, he averred, confirmed his
view that the Oedipal crisis did not exist there (1927, 95). He maintained that
Trobriand Islanders themselves had little interest in dreams—​but further on in Sex
and Repression in a Savage Society, he notes that Kula traders often sought to induce
dreams in their trading partners, thus spurring them to trade. Trobriand Islanders
 Dreaming in historical perspective 25

reversed Freud’s understanding of dreams as wish fulfillment, “for to them the

dream is the cause of the wish” (1927, 94).
On the other side of the Atlantic, Franz Boas was hostile to psychoanalysis
(Groark 2019). Privileging empirical research and witnessing ethnocidal policies
at work in North America, he urged his students to pursue a program of salvage
ethnography, seeking out the most informed members of native communities
to document their waning cultures. In a 1902 article in American Anthropologist,
Alfred Kroeber described indigenous dream theory among the Mohave of the
Colorado River region, finding that songs, myths, curing rites, and subsistence-​
related information were all bestowed in dreams.3 He would later conceptualize
the Mohave and other Yuman-​speaking peoples as possessing a “dream culture”
(1925). More detailed accounts of Yuman dream cultures followed (e.g., Devereux
1957; Harrington 1908; Park 1934; Toffelmier and Luomala (2006[1936]); Wallace
1947)—​ and revealed how attention to dreaming disclosed elaborate and vital
concepts and practices.
Other works whose authorship reads like a who’s who of early American
anthropology attest to the profound significance of dreaming among native
peoples throughout North America. Ruth Benedict (1922), Robert Lowie (e.g.,
1963[1935]), Paul Radin (1936) and Clark Wissler (1912) all focused on dreams
and visions. Boas (1925) published dozens of pages of Kwakiutl dreams collected
by his native collaborator, George Hunt. Although lacking ethnographic context,
the dreams are still a poignant record of old lifeways: dreamers fish, dig for clams,
and gather berries. Jackson Steward Lincoln was the first to offer a synthesis of
this growing salvage literature. Lincoln is most remembered for the distinction he
made between “culture pattern dreams”—​those actively sought, often by fasting
and isolation—​and “individual” or “regular night dreams.” Although inclined to
a Freudian approach, he maintained that manifest content constituted “a cultural
index,” a “kind of mirror which reflects the items of the cultural surroundings of
the dreamer” (2003[1935], 192). Lincoln’s categories would later be called into
question, but he articulated a compelling argument for dreaming as a productive
topic of anthropological interest.
Psychoanalytic approaches effloresced in the 1930s and would continue in more
or less orthodox forms for the next several decades. Associated with the Culture
and Personality school, anthropological dream studies during this period congealed
around a number of high-​ profile figures in American anthropology. Although
inspired by Freud, their studies departed from psychoanalysis in their methodo-
logical innovations and the effort to conceptualize dreaming in its distinct cultural
contexts. Deserving of special mention are George Devereux, Dorothy Eggan, and
A. Irving Hallowell—​forerunners of the distinct perspectives pursued later in the
century.
George Devereux’s ethnographic career began in the early 1930s with work
among the Mojave. Their elaborate dream theory, which in some dimensions
paralleled Freudian insights, he would later relate, converted him to psychoana-
lytic theory. An early classic in ethnopsychiatry, Reality and Dream (1969[1951])
26 Robin E. Sheriff

documents Devereux’s treatment of a Blackfoot veteran suffering from postwar

trauma. Remarkable for its floridly psychoanalytic approach and for its transcripts of
the therapeutic sessions, the book discusses many dreams. An avowed anti-​relativist
trained in Europe, Devereux used his understanding of Plains-​Indian dream theory
as a “therapeutic lever” to move his patient toward what he believed were “culturally
neutral insights” (1951/​1969, xxvii, xxxiii). Devereux also pioneered an emic angle
through his work on the Mojave, studying the intricate interconnections among
dreaming, ontology, myth, ritual, and health (e.g., 1957, 1966). He saw ontologies of
enormous complexity in indigenous dream cultures and lamented the discipline’s
lack of progress in comprehending them (1966, 216).
Dorothy Eggan began work among the Hopi in 1939 and was the first to use
a quantitative approach and to systematically argue for the use of manifest con-
tent to document culture change and dreamers’ interior struggles with both public
and private concerns. She published two articles in American Anthropologist at the
height of the postwar interest in culture-​and-​personality studies (1949, 1952), as
well as later analyses (1955, 1961, 1966). Although adopting Freudian concepts,
such as the notion that dreams function as defenses, she sought to disentangle dream
studies from the “equation-​like symbolic interpretation” offered in more orthodox
approaches (1952, 474). Eggan advanced the idea that dreamers often wrestle with
culture itself. “[F]‌ew human beings are pleased either with the demands a society
makes upon them or with their own performance in regard to these demands,” she
asserts, and in dreams “a subject can deal with a situation somewhat in terms of
his own interpretation of it—​as if he were playing chess with himself ” (1952, 470,
471). Charting more than 300 of her key informant’s dreams, she identified both
Freudian and Hopi symbols and concepts, giving greater emphasis to the particu-
larities of cultural settings and meanings (1952, 481). A vigorous correspondent
with researchers working on quantitative approaches, Eggan would inspire others
in the coming decades.
A. Irving Hallowell used dreaming to elucidate indigenous metaphysics (see
especially 1955, 1966). An active contributor to Culture and Personality debates,
Hallowell was also preoccupied with evolutionary questions and the urgency of
the ongoing salvage project (1955). His research among the Ojibwa of Ontario,
conducted throughout the 1930s, led Hallowell to systematically investigate indi-
genous conceptualizations of dreaming, self, personhood, the phenomenology of
experience, and their links to a “metaphysics of being” (1967). He maintained that,
“the culturally defined attitude toward dreams which we find among different
peoples is often a direct clue to the basic premises of their worldview” (1966,
273). Recently revisited by anthropologists engaged with the ontological turn,
Hallowell’s conceptualization of “other-​than-​human persons” is now recognized as
foundational. Often elided in newer discussions, however, is Hallowell’s emphasis
on dreaming as a primary site in which relational ontologies are experienced (cf.
Groark, this volume).
Although some anthropologists would continue well beyond mid-​ century
to make use of Freudian concepts, we see in this period the development of a
 Dreaming in historical perspective 27

distinctly anthropological sensibility in dream studies—​part of a wider movement

in psychological anthropology to question the assumption that psychological
functioning is driven always by universal principles and to consider sensitively emic
systems and their unique contexts. Some brought psychoanalysis and local theory
together, showing how the latter embodied aspects of the Freudian model—​as did
W. F. C. Wallace (1958) with the dream-​related practices of the seventeenth century
Iroquois. Others, such as John Honigmann (1961), wavered in their psychoana-
lytic commitments. Revisiting a Cree trapper’s dream of an unkillable white bear,
Honigmann speculated that the dream was not about sexual anxiety, but something
closer to the informant’s own interpretation: the trapper was in desperate straits and
in debt to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Honigmann’s willingness to consider alter-
native perspectives and the cultural and practical dilemmas of dreamers foreshadows
the development of new, more ethnographic approaches in the coming decades.

The middle years: psychoanalysis, quantitative approaches,

and indigenous theory
During the latter decades of the twentieth century, anthropological analyses of
dreaming emerged sporadically. Roy D’Andrade (1961) produced a literature
review based on the Human Relations Area Files—​the ethnographic database–
that would later become a much-​cited touchstone, validating dreaming as a topic
worthy of anthropological scrutiny (see Kilborne 1981b and Bourguignon 1972
for other reviews during this period). With the waning of Culture and Personality
studies, a persistent concern with the relationship between individuals and their
cultures allowed a literature on dreaming to flourish within the expanding field
of psychological anthropology. A new US-​based journal, Ethos, included dreaming
in its first (1973) issue and thereafter become a major venue for dream studies.
The early eighties saw a burst of dream-​related publications and in 1987, Barbara
Tedlock edited a volume whose introduction and varied chapters are still cited for
their seminal discussions. During this period, dream research fell into four dom-
inant approaches: a psychoanalytic approach; content-​analysis strategies; a structural
model; and an ethnopsychological approach.

Psychoanalytic approaches
The marriage of a Freudian model with ethnography produced a more culturally
focused psychoanalysis. A number of anthropologists, therefore, began to interpret
native interpretive systems rather than dreams themselves. Donald Tuzin considered
threatening dreams of ghosts and their interpretation among from the Ilahita Arapesh
of New Guinea.The Arapesh understood their dreams as speaking to social conflicts
in their immediate surroundings;Tuzin maintained that their dreams stemmed from
“the underlying dream thoughts of early childhood” (1975, 565). As clever as it is
heavy-​handed, Tuzin’s analysis identified Arapesh interpretive strategies as “part of
the armamentarium of resistances” they mounted to “maintain repression” (1975,
28 Robin E. Sheriff

567). Kilborne’s (1981a) study of Islamic dream interpreters in Morocco evinces

the creativity and ethical pitfalls of the interpretation-​of-​interpretations strategy.
Enlisting research confederates to present dreams excerpted in Freud’s work to nine
such interpreters, he concluded, like Tuzin, that local interpretive models operated
through resistance and denial (1981a, 307).
Also focusing on Morocco,Vincent Crapanzano (1975) engaged with the relation
between dreamers’ interior conflicts and their culture. Focusing on the members of
a religious brotherhood who often dreamed of jnun (demons), Crapanzano showed
how such dreams resolved conflict on “a level of collective, and not individual,
symbolic action”—​or alternatively, produced entrapment rather than a productive
alignment with public culture. The latter scenario became the focus of what was
then a highly experimental, reflexive monograph dealing with the imagination—​
Tuhami (1980)—​wherein Crapanzano critiqued a “reductive psychoanalytic pos-
ition” (1980, xiv), and put forward a dialogical approach.
Waud Kracke (e.g., 1981, 1991, 1999, 2003, 2006) also used a dialogical approach
in his discussions of dreaming among the Kagwahiv Parintintin of the Brazilian
Amazon—​but his psychoanalytic frame was more durable. Daily dream-​focused
interviews allowed informants to “open up fantasies and memories” that revealed
how “they felt about themselves and their current life” (1981, 260). In a widely
cited piece (1981), Kracke examines the dream of a young man, Jovenil, which
features his neighbor’s penis. Following the track of Jovenil’s associations, Kracke
argues that Jovenil blamed himself for his children’s death by measles. In much the
same way that Crapanzano exposed the snares of Moroccan culture, Kracke avers
that Jovenil’s dreaming stems from the Kagwahiv injunction to forget rather than
grieve the dead. Michele Stephen’s (1996) Freudian-​inflected analysis of the dreams
of a Mekeo woman in Papua New Guinea also identifies culture as a dream insti-
gator. Celestina’s nighttime adventures are troubled by water spirits, which Stephen
reads as evidence of “repressed erotic desire,”—​repressed because “Mekeo women
are neither expected nor encouraged to give open expression to their erotic needs”
(1996, 480). The insight that culture does more than provide the props for personal
oneiric dramas but can become, in fact, central to dreamers’ struggles, is a major
theme of anthropological dream studies after the millennium.

Quantitative approaches
During this period, quantitative approaches emerged more or less simultaneously
in psychology and anthropology. Some studies used or modified the Hall/​Van de
Castle system of content analysis, which codes a variety of dream elements to quan-
titatively compare dreamers and populations (Hall and Van de Castle 1966). Several
anthropologists pursued quantitative analyses to study how Africans processed
rapid cultural change. Robert LeVine (1966), examined the dreams of Nigerian
schoolboys, finding variations in “achievement motivation,” which he linked to
the historical trajectories of several ethnic groups. One of the more interesting
discussions was Johnson’s (1978) analysis of dream content reported by students at
 Dreaming in historical perspective 29

Makerere University during Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda—​yet it is the actual

dream narratives, rather than the quantitative results, that illustrate the terror of
Amin’s reign.
David Schneider (Schneider and Sharp 1969) performed a content analysis of
dreams collected from the Yir Yoront of New Guinea in the 1930s. Developing
his own system, he focused on the themes of sexual intercourse, death, and white
people. Schneider lamented that his experiment in dream studies was but a “rude
beginning” but the corpus of dreams and its later analysis via the Hall/​Van de Castle
system constitutes one of the few quantitatively analyzed collections from a small-​
scale society. Three further articles from this period use the Hall/​Van de Castle
system and its US norms to investigate the dreams of the Zapotecs of Mexico
(O’Nell and O’Nell 1977); the Tzintzuntzeňos of Mexico; and the Mehinaku of
Brazil (Gregor 1981b). Gregor concluded that “dream experience is less variant than
other aspects of culture,” but he acknowledged that, “to a large extent, waking
life and dream experiences run in tandem” (1981b, 389). In his investigation of
Tzintzuntzeňos, Foster identified dream motifs that confirmed his view that peasant
cultures have a cultural psychology in which “the world is viewed as a hostile place”
(1973, 108; cf. Groark this volume). Dream content, Foster concluded,“is a function
of a discrete cultural view of the universe” (1973, 106).
Sarah LeVine’s (1982) Eggan-​inspired analysis of the dreams of young Gusii
women in 1970s Kenya deserves a special mention. The quantification of dream
elements is strengthened by LeVine’s attention to Gusii women’s vulnerability and
exploitation in a patrilineal society that had recently adopted cash-​crop farming.
An under-​recognized model of how politically attuned ethnography can enliven
quantitative data, the article shows how systematic scrutiny of dreaming illuminates
sociocultural forces. LeVine’s work reminds us as well that prior to the twenty-​first
century, anthropological dream studies focused overwhelmingly on male dreamers
and their gendered experience of self and culture.

Structural approaches
Adam Kuper (1979, 1983, 1986) pioneered the use of structuralism in the ana-
lysis of dreams. Focusing on dreams from diverse sources, Kuper showed how the
binary oppositions and transformations evident in myths are evident in dreams
as well. Dreams begin with an initial problem, produce a series of transform-
ations, and achieve mediation (1983, 174). Kuper’s work is a point of departure for
Philippe Descola (1989), who asserts that Jivaroan Achuar (Ecuadorian Amazon)
dream interpretation follows a “grammar” that bears a “paradoxical affinity” with
the procedures of structuralism. “It is not the metaphorical expression of dreamt
objects that hold a divinatory value,” Descola writes,“but the metaphorical construc-
tion of their relations” (1989, 448, emphases in original). Descola’s larger body of
work is cited as foundational to the current ontological turn—​his encounter with
Amazonian dream theory no doubt played a pivotal role in generating debates that
are now at the discipline’s center.
30 Robin E. Sheriff

Kuper and Descola’s argument for a structural research program in dream studies
has found few adherents, although it continues to generate interest as is evident in
the journal Hau’s recent translation of Lucien Seabag’s (2017[1964]) analysis of the
dreams of a young Aché woman (Paraguay). Seabag applies a blend of Lacanian and
structuralist models to the dreams of a woman abused by her husband, abandoned
by her father, and subject to the devastations wrought by her culture’s collision
with capitalism. Although the paper’s theoretical pyrotechnics leave some knots
unresolved, it demonstrates the utility of dream studies in anthropological theory-​
building. “Dream analysis, pursued steadily in certain privileged circumstances,”
Seabag writes, “reveals whole sections of the cultural edifice which remain hidden
to normal observation and interrogation” (2017[1964], 522).

Ethnopsychological approaches
Indigenous dream theory was the focus of a surge of dream-​related research in
the final two decades of the twentieth century. This period saw the publication of
two edited volumes, Barbara Tedlock’s Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological
Interpretations (1992[1987]) and M. C. Jędrej and Rosalind Shaw’s Dreaming, Religion
and Society in Africa (1992). (Two other volumes—​von Grunebaum and Callois
1966; and Shulman and Stroumsa 1999—​also contain anthropological chapters).
The volumes’ chapters include a diversity of theoretical frames, but all emphasize
local understandings of dreaming and dream sharing. The signal contribution of
both is their validation of dreaming as a prism though which to elucidate otherwise
occluded dimensions of culture. Ellen Basso, for example, examines dream-​related
discourse among the Kalapalo (Brazil), showing how such an analysis clarifies
otherwise obscured ontological implications (1987/​1992, 87).
Jędrej and Shaw’s (1992) volume is notable in the number of chapters that con-
sider dreaming in the context of changing religious systems.These chapters enlarge
on what were already salient discussions of dreaming, spiritual power, and charis-
matic leadership in colonial and post-​colonial settings, initiated by Burridge (1960),
Fabian (1966), Lanternari (1975), and Stephen (1982). As before, Jędrej and Shaw’s
contributors show how dreams confer political authority and revelatory power.
Situated in specific historical moments, these accounts illustrate the ways in which
local populations and charismatic leaders have used dreaming as an avenue for vari-
ously resisting, absorbing and creatively reworking religious imaginaries in politic-
ally charged worlds (cf. Lohmann and Mittermaier, this volume).
Scintillating monographs focusing on indigenous dream theories describe
regions where local populations have maintained a degree of separation from, or
resistance against, settler colonialism. In 1975, for example, Robert Bruce published
a two-​volume study of the interpretive frameworks of the Lacandon Maya, while
Robert Laughlin (1976) published the (unanalyzed) dreams of Tzotzil informants
from Zinacantán. Also focusing on Mexico, Timothy Knab (1995) produced a
lightly fictionalized account of his shamanic apprenticeship among Nahuatl-​
speakers, emphasizing the use of dreaming in curing (see also 2004). Laura Graham
 Dreaming in historical perspective 31

(1995), used a Peircian model to examine dream-​sharing performances among

the Xavante of Brazil. Writing about the Dunne-​za of British Columbia, Robin
Ridington (1971, 1988) explicated an ontology that linked dreaming with hunting
and medicine power—​a connection much in evidence in the arctic, subarctic, and
Amazonian regions and that occupies anthropologists into the present.
Among the earlier studies is David Guss’s (1980) account of the Venezuelan
Makiritare. Makiritare ontology interweaves dreaming with a cosmology in
which “everything that exists on the earth is said to have an invisible double;”
each person’s double travels during sleep and performs a “passage between the two
worlds” (1980, 300). Guss describes volitional (lucid) dreaming among shamans,
wherein they transform into animals operating in the invisible realm. In a con-
cept similar to those in Tibetan Buddhism (Knauft, this volume), the Makiritare
propose that the visible realm is but a dream of the gods, a “transitory illusion”
(1980, 310). (For other accounts of South American peoples during this period,
see Gregor 1981; Kracke 1981; and Watson 1981.) In a dazzling discussion of the
constitution of “bush sensibility” among Chipewyan trappers, David Smith (1998)
synthesizes dream-​entangled ontologies among the northern Athapaskan peoples of
Canada. Smith locates “imaginative processes of all sorts, including dreaming” at the
center of Chipewyan experience-​centric knowledge. Hunters and trappers court
the oneiric visitation of animal teachers; what they learn informs waking awareness.
Setting Chipewyan epistemology, with its emphasis on dreaming, against Cartesian
assumptions, Smith shows how the former predicates a mode of perception
cultivated by successful hunters. The analysis prefigures current discussions about
indigenous ontologies. (On the centrality of dreaming among northern hunters, see
also Brightman 1993; Lee 1994; Rushforth 1992; Watson and Goulet 1992.)
Dream sharing, as distinct practices tied to ontologies, was taken up directly
by several researchers in the 1980s (e.g., Herdt 1977; Tedlock 1999). Based on
the HRAF files, especially useful is Price-​Williams and Degarrod’s (1989) discus-
sion of dream sharing and interpretation among the indigenous peoples of the
Americas. How dreams are classified; what sorts of dreams are shared and with
whom; whose dreams are considered important; and who has interpretive authority
are all variables they consider. In its snapshot style of reporting and extensive bibli-
ography, the article provides vivid confirmation that complex dream cultures were
extremely widespread across the Americas.

Anthropological dream studies in the new millennium

Since the turn of the twenty-​first century, anthropological dream researchers have
theorized the mutually constitutive links among dreaming, the self, subjectivity,
history, and culture. Ethnography and theory-​building around dreaming have been
far-​reaching in their engagement with mainstream disciplinary preoccupations.
While some scholars have made anthropological dream studies a significant focus of
their careers, others have published single articles that make valuable contributions.
Although recent reviews of the literature tend to be partial reports, they outnumber
32 Robin E. Sheriff

those produced in earlier periods and testify to the robustness and growing com-
plexity of the topic (e.g., Bulkeley 2008; Heijnen and Edgar 2010; Laughlin 2011;
Lohmann 2003, 2007, 2013; Mageo 2003; Stewart 2004).
Also demonstrating expansion of the field are special journal issues and two
edited volumes. Mageo’s (2003) volume brings theorizations and case studies
together. Highlighting the relation between dreaming and culturally mediated
concepts of the self, it offers fruitful proposals for conceptualizing subjectivities as
dynamic psychocultural products. Lohmann’s 2003 volume investigates dreaming
in the Western Pacific, illuminating continuities and discontinuities across diverse
regions. In a special journal issue published in Dreaming in 2004, Charles Stewart
draws together eight papers, six of which are ethnographic or auto-​ethnographic
case studies (covering Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas) and two of which
offer theoretical proposals. A special issue of History and Anthropology, edited by
Adriënne Heijnen and Iain Edgar (2010), concerns dreaming within Muslim com-
munities, as well as Europe and New Guinea. Both special issues emphasize the
assertion that dreams emerge from and are produced as social, cultural, and his-
torical products. In 2009, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry published several papers
on cross-​ cultural perspectives on the nightmares of trauma victims. Involving
anthropologists and transcultural psychiatrists, the papers make generous use of the
anthropological literature.
Since the turn of the millennium, anthropological research on dreaming clusters
roughly into three major approaches: those that take as central the relations among
dreaming, self, and culture; those that interrogate the relationships among dreaming,
religion, authority, and social change; and those that explicate local dream theories
and their interdigitation with ontologies and public practices. I consider each of
these in turn.

Dreaming and cultural psychology

In a long series of publications beginning in 2001 (see Mageo, this volume),
Jeannette Mageo argues that dreamers suffer, respond to, and remake cultural psych-
ology. Mageo seeks a convergence between cognitive anthropology and psychoana-
lytic perspectives.What emerges is what she calls “cultural psychodynamics” (2013a,
2015). For Mageo, culture is less a coherent blueprint for living than a thorny set of
prescriptions, contradictory messages, and public expectations with which young
people in Samoa and the US attempt to align their identities and through which
they puzzle through their experiences. Cultural models presume socioeconomic
and other identity-​related hierarchies that can disadvantage a dreamer. By melding
personal experience with models represented as images and motifs, dreamers con-
ceptualize these disadvantages and explore possible remedies for them (Mageo
2010, 2011). Mageo sees REM-​type dream mentation as mimetic and mimesis as
a visual form of thinking, in which iteration of a waking image supplies a subject
and dream alterations to the image are commentaries on that subject. Mimesis then,
suggests a doubling (or more) of images that make for ambiguity, a signature quality
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85 Aug
6784 Harris Thos
C 25
July
4056 Harris V S Cav 8M
27
71 May
1378 Harrington Pat
D 26
76 Oct
10384 Harrison Henry
K 5
14 Sept
8362 Harrison O
K 10
143 June
2726 Harry A
K 26
109 Aug
4705 Hart D R
D 4
5148 Hart J Cav 12 Aug
F 15
Oct
11524 Hart J Art 7K
21
146 Sept
8287 Hart S, Cor
B 9
22 Sept
8337 Hart S Cav
M 10
40 Aug
7432 Hartman J N
H 31
April
766 Harty John Cav 2M
27
39 Oct
10812 Hasket A
I 12
119 Sept
8758 Hasler M
C 14
49 Nov
11947 Hass J F
F 10
24 June
1891 Hathaway Chas Bat
- 13
Oct
10878 Hanse John Cav 1L
13
6 June
2262 Haveland H Art
- 21
22 Oct
11461 Havens Geo
G 25
141 July
3826 Havens H
A 23
104 Aug
4814 Havens S, S’t
A 5
66 July
8523 Haverslight H
E 18
11629 Hawley W L Cav 2D Oct
 28
76 Oct
10646 Hawley F
E 11
Aug
5355 Hayatt L P, Cor Cav 1A
11
Nov
11786 Hayes C 2F
4
69 Sept
8022 Hayes Edward
G 6
Sept
9080 Hayes J 6A
18
39 Oct
10904 Hayes James
E 14
35 Oct
1264 Hayes P
H 21
Sept
9134 Head Thos Art 6A
18
July
3394 Haynes W C Art 6G
16
125 Oct
10220 Hayner L
H 2
66 Oct
10662 Heacock R, S’t
H 11
47 July
3581 Hecker C
C 19
Aug
6181 Heddle Wm Cav 5M
19
132 July
3155 Hefferman D
C 11
63 Sept
8135 Helafsattan J
K 8
Oct
11382 Helf J C Cav 1G
24
6828 Heller D Art 14 Aug
- 25
85 Aug
7330 Henderson N J
K 30
100 Oct
10206 Hendfest J B
K 2
15 Oct
11380 Henertes B
I 24
Nov
11733 Hilbert G 5E
2
Sept
8336 Hennesy M Art 3K
10
85 Aug
7196 Henyon W
H 29
Oct
10870 Heratage Thos 8C
13
111 Mch
196 Herget Jno
A 27
Hermance F C, 20 July
3119 StM
Cor A 10
100 Nov
11996 Hermance J
C 13
39 Aug
4496 Herrick Chas
M 1
140 Aug
6627 Henning C
I 23
69 Oct
10566 Hestolate Jno 64
- 9
Nov
12104 Hewes J Cav 1A
20
100 Oct
11193 Hewes R, Cor
C 20
7605 Hicks W H 99 Sept
 I 2
52 Mch
99 Hietzel C
B 22
43 Sept
9937 Higgins J
G 28
99 May
888 Higgins Wm
B 4
85 July
4058 Higley Geo
F 27
85 Sept
7652 Hildreth H
K 3
88 July
3698 Hildreth L C
D 21
44 April
777 Hill A A
G 28
Sept
8643 Hill A J, Cor 2F
13
July
8970 Hill Frank Cav 2K
25
22 Nov
11998 Hill L
B 13
24 Nov
11912 Hill Wm Cav
E 8
85 July
3316 Hillman Geo
B 14
126 Aug
4454 Hines J
G 1
140 Sept
9060 Hingman A
G 17
Mch
31 Hinkley B Cav 9B
9
Aug
6255 Hinkley D “ 1E
20