Dreaming (Anthropology)

Introduction

The topic of dreaming was relatively marginalized by most anthropologists for much of the 20th century. Since the 1980s, however, interest in dreams as an object of anthropological study has grown enormously, doubtless helped by the growth in size and popularity of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, which has facilitated the exchange of ideas with psychologists, neuroscientists, and dream therapists. Anthropological research on dreaming was dominated in the postwar period by the “Culture and Personality” school of North American psychological anthropologists, who were influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. Aside from a few interesting structuralist analyses, European anthropologists showed less interest in dreams. Things changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, with the appearance of new anthropological researchers who focused on dreaming, and the injection of new theories from psychology, cognitive science, and even evolutionary biology. An increasingly self-confident anthropological paradigm has developed, which defends the view of dreams as an alternate but (at least) equally valid means of apprehending reality that is held by many non-Western peoples. Many ethnographers have viewed such a private but real-feeling experience as contributing greatly to individuals’ sense of self and identity. Most have also recognized that understandings of dreaming are closely bound up with understandings of time, because dreams are commonly seen as both reaching back to a timeless past of ancestor spirits—for example, in the Australian concept of “the Dreaming”—and reaching forward to predict the dreamer’s future (a practice known as oneiromancy). Dreams in many cultures are inseparable from deliberately induced visions: both are seen as granting direct access to supernatural agents (especially ancestor spirits). Similarly, dreams are seen as an important source of divine revelation in all the world religions. Because of this privileged connection to supernatural power, dreams are often deployed by visionary leaders in attempts to persuade others to engage in or resist dramatic cultural change. Cross-cultural psychological studies, while admittedly sparse, have tended to find more similarities than differences in the content of dreams between cultures. Even in modern Western society interest in dreaming has never really gone away, and is currently burgeoning, resulting in some fascinating recent auto-ethnographies on dreams and dreamwork (a kind of dream therapy).

General Overviews

As yet, despite the recent proliferation of anthropologists who study dreams, there is still no single- or joint-authored textbook on the anthropology of dreaming. There are, however, several important edited collections, of which Von Grunebaum and Caillois 1966 is the earliest (though it is not limited to cultural anthropology). Research on dreaming in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by the US school of psychological anthropologists, and relevant studies up to that point were summarized in Bourguignon 1972, in its contribution to an influential edited collection of psychological anthropology. A small revolution in the anthropological study of dreaming took place in the late 1980s—exemplified by the collection of articles in Tedlock 1987 (along with the literature review in Tedlock 1991)—as anthropologists sought to diversify their range of psychological and philosophical influences beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, which had been the dominant theoretical paradigm for psychological anthropologists. Some edited collections, while theoretically diverse, are limited to a certain geographical region of study: Tedlock 1987 mostly to the New World, Lohmann 2003 to Melanesia and Australia. However, Bulkeley 2001 is a very useful reader that pulls together classic anthropological articles on dreaming from all over the world, some of which appear elsewhere in this article and some of which do not. Finally, two articles help to draw connections between dreaming and other, more extensively studied areas of anthropological research: Bourguignon 1972 was very influential in developing an “altered states of consciousness” approach which viewed dreaming (as most non-Western people do) as closely related to the phenomena of ritual trance and spirit possession and, most recently, Galinier, et al. 2010 argues that the relative anthropological neglect of dreaming is just one example of the ethnographic privileging of public, daytime experiences over private, nighttime ones.

Bourguignon, Erika E. 1972. Dreams and altered states of consciousness in anthropological research. In Psychological anthropology. 2d ed. Edited by Francis L. K. Hsu, 403–434. Homewood, IL: Dorsey.
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Argues that dreams form part of a continuum with trance-induced visions and spirit possession, with not all languages distinguishing semantically between these phenomena. Many cultures see all three as offering genuine access to supernatural agents, differing only in the social context of their production.
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Bulkeley, Kelly, ed. 2001. Dreams: A reader on religious, cultural and psychological dimensions of dreaming. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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A collection of classic articles on dreaming, drawn from religious studies and psychology as well as anthropology. Includes anthropological works by Kracke 1981 (cited under Psychological and Psychoanalytic Anthropology) and Lohmann 2000 (cited under Dreams and Cultural Change/Continuity). There are also articles on the significance of dreams in Buddhism, Islam, and ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion.
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Edgar, Iain R. Anthropology and the dream.
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Iain Edgar’s academic home page is a brief and freely accessible overview of anthropological approaches to dreaming, with bibliographic references and links to several other pages covering various research topics on dreaming in more detail.
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Galinier, Jacques, Aurore Monod Becquelin, Guy Bordin, et al. 2010. Anthropology of the night: Cross-disciplinary investigations. Current Anthropology 51:819–847.
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Eight French and two Italian anthropologists come together to propose that anthropology has badly neglected half of all human experience: the nighttime half. Includes seven commentaries (by Chenhall, Daveluy, Ekirch, Glaskin, Heijnen, Steger, and Wright) and a response by the original authors. Translated from French by Richard Crabtree.
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Lohmann, Roger Ivar, ed. 2003. Dream travelers: Sleep experiences and culture in the western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
DOI: 10.1057/9781403982476Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A theoretically diverse collection of articles about dreaming in societies from New Guinea and aboriginal Australia (and one from Sulawesi). Authors not appearing elsewhere in this bibliography include Joel Robbins; Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern; Wolfgang Kempf and Elfriede Herrmann; Robert Tonkinson; Ian Keen; and Jane Goodale.
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Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1987. Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A seminal collection of articles aimed at reinvigorating the anthropology of dreaming (which Tedlock deems to have fallen into neglect following the collapse of the Culture and Personality school) by exposing it to various psychological theories of dreaming. Authors include Gilbert Herdt, Bruce Mannheim, William Merrill, and John Homiak.
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Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. The new anthropology of dreaming. Dreaming 1:161–178.
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Highlights the change within anthropology between the mid- and late 20th century, from the statistical content analysis of dream reports from different cultures (associated with the Culture and Personality school) to the dominance of more qualitative accounts. The appearance of anthropologists’ own dreams in ethnographic reports has been key.
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Von Grunebaum, G. E., and Roger Caillois, eds. 1966. The dream and human societies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A highly eclectic collection of essays, including theoretical perspectives from neurophysiology, Jungian psychology, phenomenology, literary theory, and sociology; ethnographic reports from the Hopi, Ojibwa, and modern Mexico; and historical studies of dreams in ancient Greek, Mesopotamian, and Islamic literature. Anthropological contributors include George Devereux and Dorothy Eggan.
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Journals, Special Issues, and Professional Organizations

Many articles on dreaming have appeared in mainstream anthropological journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. But two specialist anthropology journals that include more articles on dreaming than most are Ethos and Anthropology of Consciousness. In addition, the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Dreaming, regularly publishes work by anthropologists. Several special issues, including Stewart 2004, Kennedy and Langness 1981, and Heijnen and Edgar 2010, are also listed here, as these are a good, quick way of getting a range of perspectives on dreaming.

Anthropology of Consciousness.
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Published by the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, this journal includes articles from multidisciplinary perspectives that focus on the study of consciousness and/or its practical application to contemporary issues.
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Dreaming.
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A peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Dreaming is truly multidisciplinary and accepts contributions from any scholar with an interest in dreams, including anthropologists, artists, biologists, clinicians, humanities scholars, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists.
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Ethos.
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Published by the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, Ethos is an interdisciplinary journal dealing with the interface between anthropology and psychology, and hence the relationship between the individual and society.
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Heijnen, Adrienne, and Iain Edgar, eds. 2010. Special issue: Imprints of Dreaming. History and Anthropology 21.3.
DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2010.500617Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes contributions by Roger Lohmann on the Asabano, Iain Edgar and David Henig on the Islamic concept of istikhara, Stephen Lyon on Punjabis, Maria Louw on the Kyrgyz, Marzia Blazani on British Muslims, Adrienne Heijnen on Icelanders, and Elisabeth Kirtsoglou on modern Greeks.
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International Association for the Study of Dreams.
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The website of the premier organization for those interested in dreams, which includes laypeople and therapists as well as academics, contains details of many past and future conferences and workshops on dreaming.
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Kennedy, John, and L. L. Langness, eds. 1981. Special issue: Dreams. Ethos 9.4.
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This special issue includes contributions by Thomas Gregor on the Mehinaku of Brazil, Barbara Herr on Fijians, Benjamin Kilborne on Moroccans, Waud Kracke on the Kagwahiv of Brazil, Sarah Levine on the Gusii of Kenya, and Barbara Tedlock on the Quiché Maya.
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Stewart, Charles, ed. 2004. Special issue: Anthropological approaches to dreaming. Dreaming 14.2–3.
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Contributions include Murray Wax on hunter-gatherers, Roland Littlewood on the Earth People of Trinidad, Daniela Peluso on the Ese Eja of Peru, Elisha Renne on Nigerian Christians, Vishvajit Pandya on Andaman Islanders, Barbara Tedlock on Native Americans, and theoretical articles by Jeannette Mageo and Douglas Hollan.
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Early Classics

Anthropological research on dreams up to about 1960 was ably summarized in D’Andrade 1961, a contribution to the first edition of an influential edited collection of psychological anthropology. The anthropology of dreams is generally accepted to begin with Tylor 1871. The author famously suggested that the universal experience of dreaming gives rise to cross-cultural beliefs in the existence of a soul that can leave the body and travel in a spirit world. While the idea that dreams can influence conscious beliefs (and thus, ultimately, ritual behavior) like this has recently been repopularized, for many years it was neglected in favor of the Freudian approach of seeing dreams as mere reflections of the unconscious mind. Anthropologists of the interwar period, led by the author of Seligman 1923, were interested in testing the universality of the dream symbols proposed by Freud. Seligman’s student, the author of Lincoln 1935, wrote the first book on the anthropology of dreams, focusing on North American Indians. His distinction between significant “culture pattern” and trivial “individual” dreams has been critiqued relatively recently in Kilborne 1981, which argues that cultural context affects how all dreams are interpreted. A greater sensitivity to the cultural significance of dreaming was characteristic of anthropologists in the 1950s. Devereux 1951 is able to integrate Devereux’s Plains Indian informant/patient’s belief that his dreams prefigured waking outcomes into a culturally sensitive program of Freudian-inspired psychotherapy for the same individual. Eggan 1952 presents a similar method of comparatively analyzing the content of dream reports to that proposed in Seligman 1923, but with more awareness of cultural differences in the concept of dreams and how this affects what is reported. Bourguignon 1954 is more radical, emphasizing the sense of reality attached to dreams as a valid form of communication with spirit beings in Haiti, which means that they cannot be interpreted on a purely symbolic level. This attitude of respect toward native beliefs in the validity of dream experience was highly influential, and would eventually become the dominant paradigm in the postwar anthropology of dreaming.

Bourguignon, Erika E. 1954. Dreams and dream interpretation in Haiti. American Anthropologist 56:262–268.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1954.56.2.02a00080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that culture affects not just the content of dreams but also the interpretation that is put on them. Haitian peasants, like many other peoples, see dreams as a direct means of communication with spiritual beings, no less real than waking experience.
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D’Andrade, Roy G. 1961. Anthropological studies of dreams. In Psychological anthropology: Approaches to culture and personality. 1st ed. Edited by Francis L. K. Hsu, 296–332. Homewood, IL: Dorsey.
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This comprehensive review of early anthropological studies of dreams proposes six cross-cultural universals of dreaming. Most important of these, for D’Andrade, is that dreams are everywhere seen as a means of contacting supernatural agents, whether for divine revelation or simply for staying in touch with deceased relatives.
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Devereux, George. 1951. Reality and dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. New York: International Universities Press.
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An early attempt to integrate Freudian psychoanalysis with ethnographic fieldwork, which more or less initiated the entire field of ethno-psychiatry. Devereux was able to incorporate his Crow Indian informant’s belief that success in a dream prefigures success in the waking world into his therapeutic work with the same individual.
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Eggan, Dorothy. 1952. The manifest content of dreams: A challenge to social science. American Anthropologist 54:469–485.
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Views dreams as a universal human experience whose content varies according to the cultural background of the dreamer. Presents a method of comparing dreams between individuals using a dream analysis chart, in order to isolate certain themes and assess the impact of different social and cultural variables.
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Kilborne, Benjamin. 1981. Pattern, structure, and style in anthropological studies of dreams. Ethos 9:165–185.
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A critique of J. S. Lincoln’s concept of “culture pattern dreams.” Kilborne argues that while dreams do follow distinct patterns, these are affected by cultural classificatory schemes in complex ways, and should not be automatically assumed to reflect objective differences in the primary dream experience.
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Lincoln, Jackson Steward. 1935. The dream in primitive cultures. London: Cresset.
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From studying North American Indian dreams, Lincoln developed the important concept of “culture pattern” dreams, which are seen as significant for the whole community, as distinct from “individual” dreams, which are thought simply to reflect trivial occurrences in an individual’s life. Culture pattern dreams are actively pursued by the dreamer.
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Seligman, C. G. 1923. Note on dreams. Man 23:186–188.
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Initiated the systematic cross-cultural study of dreaming with his call for ethnographers to routinely collect dream reports from the peoples with whom they were working. Seligman even presents a suggested method for standardized recording of dreams, with a view to testing whether certain dream symbols proposed by Freud are universal.
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Tylor, E. B. 1871. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom. London: John Murray.
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Probably the first anthropologist to write about dreams, Tylor notoriously proposed that the alternation of consciousness between dreaming and waking promotes a belief in the reality of a spirit world, and ultimately religion in general. This often-derided insight is more profound than it seems, and may be due for rehabilitation.
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Psychological and Psychoanalytic Anthropology

The anthropology of dreaming in the postwar period was dominated by the “Culture and Personality” school of psychological anthropology, which was heavily influenced by Freudian theory. This approach saw differing cultural conditions as encouraging the growth of differing personalities in individuals: certain personalities might thrive in one culture, but shrivel in another. The influence of culture on personality is naturally reflected in dreams, which can represent intrapsychic conflict and wish fulfillment. Accordingly, Eggan 1961 analyzes how Hopi Indian culture affected both the manifest content of Hopi dreams (the dream symbols that appeared in them) and their latent content (what informants’ interpretation of their dreams revealed about the conflicts involved in maintaining a certain sense of personality). Psychological anthropologists such as the author of Foster 1973 attempted to classify cultures according to the kinds of personality and emotion that they promoted: the Mexican inhabitants of Tzintzuntzan were viewed as belonging to a “shame culture” (as, in fact, most small-scale societies were), whereas the modern United States was associated with a “guilt culture.” The Culture and Personality school had waned by the 1980s, but some anthropologists continued to use Freudian techniques. Kracke (Kracke 1981 and Kracke 1999) followed in Devereux’s ethnopsychiatric tradition by carrying out psychoanalytic interviews with troubled Kagwahiv (Parintintin) individuals in central Brazil. More recently, working from a neo-Freudian perspective, Hollan 2004 develops the concept of the “selfscape dream,” a type of dream—perceived as vivid and significant by the dreamer—whose latent content is particularly revealing about how the dreamer relates himself or herself to the social world. The use of a Jungian framework has not been nearly as common as the use of a Freudian framework, but Shulman 1997 makes a bold attempt to integrate Jungian psychoanalysis (also known as depth psychology) with modern complexity theory. While not an anthropologist herself, the author did include substantial cross-cultural material on the greater value placed on dreams by small-scale societies.

Eggan, Dorothy. 1961. Dream analysis. In Studying personality cross-culturally. Edited by B. Kaplan, 551–577. New York: Harper & Row.
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Uses Freudian analytical techniques and a detailed understanding of cultural context to try to get at what her Hopi informants’ dreams really mean to them, on an inner subjective level.
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Foster, George M. 1973. Dreams, character, and cognitive orientation in Tzintzuntzan. Ethos 1:106–121.
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A quantitative content analysis of dreams from Michoacán in west-central Mexico. Foster argues that the manifest content of Tzintzuntzan dreams reveals the dreamers’ cultural preoccupations and shows that they belong to a “shame culture” rather than a “guilt culture.”
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Hollan, Douglas. 2004. The anthropology of dreaming: Selfscape dreams. Dreaming 14:170–182.
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“Selfscape dreams,” in Hollan’s coinage, are a highly vivid and embodied form of dreaming that communicate to dreamers some aspect of how they relate to their social world. Hollan focuses on dreams that reveal some sort of sickness in the dreamer, providing examples from Indonesia, New Guinea, and the United States.
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Kracke, Waud H. 1981. Kagwahiv mourning: Dreams of a bereaved father. Ethos 9:258–275.
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Through psychoanalytic dream interpretation sessions, Kracke reveals the sublimated mourning and guilt of a young Parintintin headman in central Brazil. He differs from classical Freudian tradition in seeing the “primary process” of the headman’s dreams as no less sophisticated than the “secondary process” of conscious thought.
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Kracke, Waud H. 1999. A language of dreaming: Dreams of an Amazonian insomniac. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80:257–271.
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Explores the cultural context of the psychoanalytic understanding of dreams, via a series of psychoanalytic interviews with an old Parintintin woman, in which she confronts her insomnia and locates it in childhood memories of parental strife. Kracke argues that certain Parintintin beliefs about dreams exacerbate their repressed anxieties.
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Shulman, Helene. 1997. Living at the edge of chaos: Complex systems in culture and psyche. Einsiedeln, Germany: Daimon Verlag.
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Attempts to reinterpret Jungian depth psychology in the light of modern complexity theory. Dreams are analyzed as an “integrative modeling system” that operates outside our conscious control, and which is more highly valued by small-scale cultures.
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Structuralist Analyses

French structural anthropology presents an interesting contrast with the American school of psychological anthropology. Rather than being interested in cultural and individual differences, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structural anthropologists who followed him looked at how universal mental transformations are applied to cultural material, creating recurring patterns of cultural products. The first attempt to apply this method to dreams was in DaMatta 1970. More recently, Descola 1989 applies the method to the interpretation of dreams, rather than the raw material of dream reports, showing that the rules used by the Jívaro people to predict the future from dreams follow classic structuralist principles. A structuralist approach has also been adopted by British social anthropologists, notably Adam Kuper, who used Lévi-Strauss’s ideas to reanalyze dreams originally recounted by Devereux and Freud in Kuper 1979 and Kuper and Stone 1982. However, structuralist theories of dreaming do not seem to have got much further than the (admittedly very interesting) insight that dream reports and systems of dream interpretation have a similar structure to mythic narratives. Perhaps this is because structuralism is fundamentally just a descriptive, rather than an explanatory, theory of human cognition. A full explanation of dreaming may require the integration of a structuralist approach with more recent cognitive and evolutionary theories (see the Cognitive, Evolutionary, and Neuroscientific Studies).

DaMatta, Roberto. 1970. Les présages apinayé. In Échanges et communications: Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss. Vol. 1. Edited by Jean Pouillon and Pierre Maranda, 77–99. The Hague: Mouton.
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Noting the similarities between dreams, omens and myths among the Apinajé of east-central Brazil, DaMatta applies Lévi-Strauss’s methods of structural analysis—originally developed on systems of North and South American Indian myths—to the dream-report as text. Dreams are simply a pool of possible signs to be shaped by interpretation.
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Descola, Philippe. 1989. Head-shrinkers versus shrinks: Jivaroan dream analysis. Man 24:439–450.
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Rather than focusing solely on the content of dreams, Descola, a student of Lévi-Strauss, makes a structural study of dream interpretation, arguing that the interpretation of dreams by the Achuar of the upper Amazon follows similar logical rules to those used by structural anthropologists in the interpretation of myths.
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Kuper, Adam. 1979. A structural approach to dreams. Man 14:645–662.
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Reinterpreting George Devereux’s psychoanalytic study of a Plains Indian’s dreams, Kuper analyzes dreams as modes of argumentation, with the dreamer using general transformation rules to move from one proposition to another until he or she can resolve the problem posed by the dream.
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Kuper, Adam, and A. A. Stone. 1982. The dream of Irma’s injection: A structural analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry 139:1225–1234.
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Again noting the similarity between dreams and myths, Kuper and Stone reanalyze one of Freud’s classic dreams about his patient, Irma. They focus on the structural coherence of the dream report, rather than engaging in what they see as the “piecemeal” symbol interpretation of psychoanalysis.
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Cognitive, Evolutionary, and Neuroscientific Studies

The impact of the postwar “Cognitive Revolution” in psychology is finally being felt in anthropology, with recent studies on dreaming influenced by work in the cognitive science of religion, which sees the human mind as predisposed to believe in supernatural agents (Jacobson 2009, Lohmann and Dahl 2013, Nordin 2011). When applied to anthropology, a cognitive approach is often combined with evolutionary theory (perhaps because important new theoretical ideas in evolutionary biology—notably inclusive fitness and costly signaling—appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, about the same time that the cognitive paradigm was becoming dominant in psychology). Although it is written by a philosopher rather than an anthropologist, Flanagan 2000 is included here because it made the explicitly evolutionary argument that dreaming is a “spandrel” (an evolved by-product) of REM sleep, rather than having adaptive significance in itself. The alternative is to postulate an evolutionary function for dreams, as Brereton 2000 (arguing against Flanagan) does, when it suggests that dreaming is about the simulation of fitness-relevant social situations. A related evolutionary theory is proposed in Nordin 2011, focusing on nightmares as simulating threats that need to be avoided in waking life. Lohmann and Dahl 2013 also sees dreaming as adaptive, but more because of its relationship to creativity and imagination, activities in waking life from which dreaming cannot be strictly separated. Several other evolutionary theories of dreaming, including an application of costly signaling theory by Patrick McNamara, Erica Harris, and Anna Kookoolis, appear in Barrett and McNamara 2007. However, it is not necessary to take an explicitly evolutionary approach in order to be influenced by innovations in cognitive science (and still more recently in neuroscience): both Jacobson 2009 and Laughlin 2011 argue that commonalities in the neural substrate of the human brain can explain cross-cultural similarities in dreaming.

Barrett, Deirdre, and Patrick McNamara, eds. 2007. The new science of dreaming. Vol. 3, Cultural and theoretical perspectives. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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A diverse collection of (broadly anthropological) articles on dreaming, most of which adopt a more “scientific” perspective than works in other sections of this article. Evolutionary theories of dreaming are provided by Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo; Patrick McNamara, et al.; Deirdre Barrett; and Alan T. Lloyd.
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Brereton, Derek P. 2000. Dreaming, adaptation, and consciousness: The social mapping hypothesis. Ethos 28:379–409.
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Develops a theory of dreaming as a preadaptation for human consciousness, based on the premises that dreams predominantly involve the rehearsal of virtual social scenarios, and that human evolution has been driven by the pressure for increased social intelligence (the social brain hypothesis).
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Flanagan, Owen. 2000. Dreaming souls: Sleep, dreams, and the evolution of the conscious mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Proposes that dreams are not really meaningful per se, but are simply a spandrel (an evolved epiphenomenon) of neural processes that take place during REM sleep.
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Jacobson, C. Jeffrey, Jr. 2009. The nightmares of Puerto Ricans: An embodied “altered states of consciousness” perspective. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 33:266–289.
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Analyzes nightmare narratives (especially those resulting from episodes of sleep paralysis), collected in a US inner-city Puerto Rican community, as reflecting a traumatic form of altered state of consciousness. Argues from a cognitive science of religion perspective that these narratives reflect common cross-cultural themes in the embodiment of religious experience.
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Laughlin, Charles D. 2011. Communing with the gods: The dreaming brain in cross-cultural perspective. Time and Mind 4:155–188.
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An overview linking the neuropsychology of dreams with cross-cultural patterns in their form and interpretation. Focuses on lucid dreaming (dreams that are consciously controlled by the sleeper), drawing on illustrations from the author’s fieldwork with Tantric Buddhist yogis in Tibet. Laughlin’s book is also called Communing with the Gods (2011, Brisbane, Australia: Daily Grail).
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Lohmann, Roger Ivar, and Shayne A. P. Dahl. 2013. Sleep, dreaming, and the imagination: Psychosocial adaptations to an ever-changing world. Reviews in Anthropology 42:56–84.
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Argues that psychological and anthropological approaches to dreaming complement each other well, and should be integrated (along the lines of cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion). Doing so encourages us to value dreaming as an adaptive behavior on a continuum with waking creativity and imagination.
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Nordin, Andreas. 2011. Dreaming in religion and pilgrimage: Cognitive, evolutionary and cultural perspectives. Religion 41:225–249.
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Inspired by the cognitive science of religion, Nordin puts forward a highly specific theory of dreaming as an evolved system of threat simulation, based on a hyperactive agency detection device. He uses dream reports from his own ethnography of Hindu pilgrims in Himalaya, and from Alan Morinis’s work in Bengal.
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Dreaming, Self, and Identity

Several authors have examined how dreams contribute to notions of self and identity, while drawing on philosophical influences that do not fit naturally into the theoretical sections already listed in this article. Eggan 1955, however, analyzes a Hopi Indian’s dreams using a theoretical perspective—psychological anthropology, inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis—that is discussed elsewhere, while Herr 1981 uses a similar perspective to examine conflict and anxiety in Fijian dreams. Contributions to Mageo 2003, for example, cite influences including Jacques Lacan and Paul Ricoeur. Desjarlais 1991 draws parallels between the Nepali Yolmo understanding of dreams as reflecting a subjectivity that reaches beyond the individual self, and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic concept of information-processing at the level of the “total self-corrective unit,” which is also wider than an individual body. Stephen 1996 critiques psychoanalytic theory, arguing that it privileges dream interpreters by assuming that they have a better understanding of dreams than the dreamers themselves; instead, it sees Mekeo dreams as reflecting the existence of another (side to the) self, which the dreamer’s waking self can accept, ignore, or reject as it chooses. Groark 2010 cites several philosophers who have written on agency and the will, including Martin Heidegger, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. Mageo 2012 uses Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to show how dreaming individuals can engage with (and sometimes evade) the stereotyped ways in which they are “hailed” and categorized by an “ideological state apparatus.”

Desjarlais, Robert R. 1991. Dreams, divination, and Yolmo ways of knowing. Dreaming 1:211–224.
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Explores how the Yolmo Sherpa of Nepal use reports of divinatory dreams to communicate and infer distress about events (often involving social conflict)—feelings that they are unwilling to discuss openly. Desjarlais links this activity to Yolmo beliefs that dreams are sent by the gods to keep people healthy.
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Eggan, Dorothy. 1955. The personal use of myth in dreams. Journal of American Folklore 68:445–453.
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Recounts how a Hopi informant was able to resolve some personal problems (including inner conflicts over cultural identity) through dreams, by identifying his own problems with the mythic adventures of the Hopi culture-heroes that he dreamed about.
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Groark, Kevin P. 2010. Willful souls: Dreaming and the dialectics of self-experience among the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico. In Toward an anthropology of the will. Edited by Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop, 101–122. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.11126/stanford/9780804768870.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that dreams among the highland Maya illustrate their belief that agency is not the sole preserve of the waking self. “Investiture dreams,” in which the dreamer makes contact with a deity, are seen as the product partly of the deity’s agency and partly of the dreamer’s essential soul.
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Herr, Barbara. 1981. The expressive character of Fijian dream and nightmare experiences. Ethos 9:331–352.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.1981.9.4.02a00060Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Looks at examples of fear and anxiety in the dreams of Fulagan Fijians, showing that they are largely produced by sexual conflict and status anxiety. According to Herr, the affective quality of these dreams both reflects the Fijian worldview and helps to reinforce it.
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Mageo, Jeanette Marie, ed. 2003. Dreaming and the self: New perspectives on subjectivity, identity, and emotion. Albany: State University of New York.
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A collection of articles exploring what dreams can reveal about people’s actual lived experience of various cultures. Globalization and postcoloniality are common themes of several of the articles. Contributors include Erika Bourguignon, Katherine Ewing, Douglas Hollan, Waud Kracke, Michele Stephen, Melford Spiro, and Vincent Crapanzano.
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Mageo, Jeanette Marie. 2012. Dreaming sexed identities and Althusser. Anthropology and Humanism 37:45–63.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01107.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that dreams allow people to explore potentially transgressive social identities in a safe environment. Uses Althusser’s idea of interpellation to show in a case study how “Alice” (a US undergraduate) uses dreams (consciously or unconsciously) to try to avoid being pigeonholed by an ideological state apparatus.
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Stephen, Michele. 1996. Dreams and self‐knowledge among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea. Ethos 24:465–490.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.1996.24.3.02a00030Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Mekeo experience of dreaming, according to Stephen, reflects their belief in a divided self, by putting them in touch with aspects of themselves that are unavailable to their conscious mind. This is illustrated by a case study of a woman whose dreams reveal underlying sexual jealousy about her husband.
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Dreams and Reality

Many anthropologists have been keen to emphasize the fact that dreams are seen by many of their informants as no less real than waking life. As in other areas of the anthropology of dreaming, ethnographies of South American Indians have led the way (Watson 1981, Peluso 2004, Vargas 2007). Edgar 1999 takes a slightly different perspective on the author’s UK dreamworker informants, arguing that the reality of dreams for them is constructed through group performances. And a very different philosophical perspective is presented in Hacking 2001, which marshals a wide range of cultural evidence in support of the author’s thesis that significant dreams are always associated with a significant place.

Edgar, Iain. 1999. Dream fact and real fiction: The realization of the imagined self. Anthropology of Consciousness 10:28–42.
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Explores how personal identity and notions of consciousness are constructed in contemporary dreamwork groups in the United Kingdom. Edgar contends that dream reports, in these contexts, are not static texts, but dynamic performances created by the group, giving sense to the nonsense of dreams by incorporating them in imagined self-presentations.
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Hacking, Ian. 2001. Dreams in place. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:245–260.
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The philosopher Hacking argues that significant dreams are characteristically associated with a particular place, whether this is dreamed about or dreamt in. He situates his argument anthropologically in the context of “high European culture,” drawing on biblical Israel, classical Greece, the Roman de la Rose, Descartes, Freud, and modern sleep laboratories.
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Peluso, Daniela M. 2004. That which I dream is true: Dream narratives in an Amazonian community. Dreaming 14.2–3: 107–119.
DOI: 10.1037/1053-0797.14.2-3.107Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In an ethnography of the Ese Eja of Peru, Peluso shows how “naming dreams” (in which people dream the names of their unborn children) reflect local concepts of agency, personhood, and reality. Names are often inspired by dreams of spirit animals, which share both name and personhood with the child.
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Vargas, Juan Camilo Niño. 2007. Sueño, realidad y conocimiento: Noción del sueño y fenomenología del soñar entre los Ette del norte de Colombia. Antípoda: Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 5:293–315.
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Shows how the Ette conceive of dreams as an alternative route to culturally validated knowledge about reality. Dreams contribute to the reproduction of a system of local knowledge, by allowing experiential contact with certain categories of being. The title translates as “Dream, reality and knowledge: Concept of the dream and phenomenology of dreaming among the Ette of northern Colombia.”
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Watson, Lawrence C. 1981. Dreaming as world view and action in Guajiro culture. Journal of Latin American Lore 7:239–254.
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Argues that dreams for the Wayuu people of the Guajiro peninsula (on the Colombia/Venezuela border) are not seen as products of the imagination, but as alternative sources of information about reality. However Watson does downplay the fact that Wayuu see some dreams as trivial, nonsensical fancies.
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Histories of Dream Interpretation

Dreams are not only of significance to contemporary small-scale societies, but have also been important in the history of European culture and the other great cultures of the world. The single most useful entry here is Shulman and Stroumsa 1999, which covers dreaming in many historical periods and geographical regions. Pick and Roper 2004 is another edited collection of this kind, but one that is limited to European history and focused on the early modern period. Parman 1991 attempts to do a similar job in a single-authored book, but it is surprisingly short and skims over several historical epochs. The use of dream interpretation to aid medical treatment was a notable feature of the Greco-Roman healing cult of Asclepius: Price 1986 and Stephens 2012 describe two Greek diviners who left written records of dreams from the 2nd century, Artemidorus of Ephesus and Aelius Aristides. Kruger 1992 explores the ambiguous understanding of dreams (including uncertainty as to whether they came from God or the Devil) evidenced in medieval European “dreambooks,” many of which attempted to give particular meanings to particular dream symbols, such as bears and earthquakes. Finally, Moss 2008 is a popular but fun account of the dreams of various historical notables.

Kruger, Steven F. 1992. Dreaming in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511518737Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores the world of the medieval dreambooks, including autobiographical reports of dream visions as well as more philosophical and theological accounts. Shows that the medieval attitude to dreams was fundamentally ambivalent, viewing them with fascination but also suspicion.
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Moss, Robert. 2008. The secret history of dreaming. Novato, CA: New World Library.
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A popular book containing many highly quotable excerpts from the dream reports of a wide range of famous historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill.
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Parman, Susan. 1991. Dream and culture: An anthropological study of the Western intellectual tradition. New York: Praeger.
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A brief overview of how concepts of dreaming have changed through European history, from ancient Greece through the neo-Platonist thinkers, to medieval, Renaissance, Victorian, and modern ideas. Parman focuses on selected epochs and literary works (e.g., The Romance of the Rose), rather than attempting to give a comprehensive account.
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Pick, Daniel, and Lyndal Roper, eds. 2004. Dreams and history: The interpretation of dreams from ancient Greece to modern psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
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A collection of articles on attitudes to dreaming in various periods of European history. Apart from one article on the ancient and early Christian periods, and another on medieval literature, the focus is very much on the roots of the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams in early modern and Romantic practices.
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Price, Simon F. 1986. The future of dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus. Past and Present 113:3–37.
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Describes the elaborate system of rules set out by the Greek diviner Artemidorus of Ephesus in the 2nd century for predicting the future from dreams. Price points out that this approach contrasts strongly with Freudian psychoanalysis, which sees dreams as reflecting only the dreamer’s past.
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Shulman, David, and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds. 1999. Dream cultures: Explorations in the comparative history of dreaming. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A comprehensive collection of articles about dreaming in many settings and periods of history, including early China; India; Amerindia; classical Greece and Rome; the early Christian world; medieval Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; and the worlds of Milton (when he wrote Paradise Lost) and Freud (when he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams).
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Stephens, John C. 2012. The dreams of Aelius Aristides: A psychological interpretation. International Journal of Dream Research 5:76–86.
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An attempt to diagnose the psychological problems of a 2nd-century sophist and member of the Greco-Roman healing cult of Asclepius, by examining the dream reports that he recorded as religious experiences in his diary (known as the Sacred Tales).
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The “Dreaming” of Australian Aboriginals

One of the most famous examples of dreaming in the ethnographic literature is the “Dreaming” (or “Dreamtime”)—the English word generally used (though it may be based on a mistranslation) to describe the Australian Aboriginal concept of a sort of plane of existence inhabited by ancestral spirits, which parallels the everyday world in spatial terms but completely transcends everyday notions of time. The term was popularized by the influential Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner in a series of lectures and essays in the 1950s and 1960s (some of which are reprinted in Stanner 2010). There is some controversy over whether the term should be used at all (some Aboriginal groups prefer the term “the Law”): Wolfe 1991 argues that it is an invention of settler culture that primitivizes Aboriginals and excludes them from white discourse, whereas Hume 1999 claims that it reflects a valid way of understanding the world that is lacking from modern Western culture. There is also dispute over how old the complex of ideas that constitute the Dreaming is: perhaps because the concept itself seems so timeless, it has commonly been assumed to date back thousands of years; but David 2002 argues from archaeological evidence that it arose only during the last millennium. The actual experience of dreaming as Westerners understand it is often only obliquely referenced in discussions of the Dreaming. However, Poirier 2005 very clearly relates a group of Western Australian Aboriginals’ everyday beliefs and practices surrounding dreams to their abstract understanding of history and their ancestors.

David, Bruno. 2002. Landscapes, rock-art and the Dreaming: An archaeology of preunderstanding. Leicester, UK: Leicester Univ. Press.
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Considers the archaeological evidence for locations and rituals described in the Dreaming traditions. Uses Gadamer’s concept of “preunderstanding” to argue that the Dreaming is not a static tradition, but a form of understanding of the world that emerged within the last millennium.
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Hume, Lynne. 1999. On the unsafe side of the white divide: New perspectives on the Dreaming of Australian Aborigines. Anthropology of Consciousness 10:1–15.
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In a good example of the new anthropological confidence in defending informants’ assertions that dreams offer a valid means of accessing reality, Hume uses a Schutzian phenomenological perspective to argue that aboriginal notions of the Dreaming reflect fundamental truths about the universe.
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Poirier, Sylvie. 2005. A world of relationships: Itineraries, dreams, and events in the Australian Western Desert. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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Focuses on contemporary practices surrounding dreams in the Balgo Hills of Western Australia, but includes a chapter connecting dreams to Aboriginals’ understandings of their ancestors and their history.
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Stanner, W. E. H. 2010. The Dreaming, and other essays. Collingwood, Australia: Black.
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Stanner, a student of Radcliffe-Brown and Firth, was very influential in the development of Australian social anthropology. He describes the Dreaming as “everywhen”: at once a narrative of things that happened, a charter of things that still happen, and an abstract principle of order.
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Wolfe, Patrick. 1991. On being woken up: The Dreamtime in anthropology and in Australian settler culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 33:197–224.
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500017011Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Influenced by Talal Asad and James Clifford, Wolfe argues that the concept of the Dreaming is an invention of anthropologists and has contributed to a hegemonic discourse within wider Australian culture, in which Aborigines are seen as primitive and Other, something not to be talked about.
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Oneiromancy among Amerindians

One of the most striking features of dream interpretation across the world is its frequent use to predict the dreamer’s future (oneiromancy). Although known from ancient Greece (in the writings of the diviner Artemidorus of Ephesus) the practice is particularly strong—and has been particularly well studied—among Amerindian peoples. Tedlock 1999 is an excellent and extremely comprehensive review of 20th-century research on Amerindian dreams, including both articles with a focus on dreams and passing references in general ethnographies. One of the first writers to focus on oneiromancy as a social practice was the author of Guss 1980, in his work with the Makiritare of Venezuela. Two standout ethnographies are Basso 1985, which relates Kalapalo dreaming to their broader systems of myth and ritual, and Descola 1996, a unique and highly readable book that includes a structuralist analysis of Jivaroan oneiromancy. A more recent article, Kohn 2007, describes how Amazonian oneiromancy extends to animals’ dreams as well as humans’.

Basso, Ellen B. 1985. A musical view of the universe: Kalapalo myth and ritual performances. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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An ethnography of the Kalapalo, a tiny group of Carib-speaking Indians who live in a state of artificial isolation in the Xingu National Park of central Brazil. Discusses dream reporting and interpretation as a ritual performance, which is believed to have illocutionary effects on the future.
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Descola, Philippe. 1996. The spears of twilight. Translated by Janet Lloyd. London: HarperCollins.
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First published in French in 1993, this book is somewhere between an ethnography and a brilliant piece of travel writing. It includes extensive material on dreams, which the Achuar (a Jivaroan people of upper Amazonia) use every morning to guide their daily routine—for example, if the dreams predict a successful hunt.
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Guss, David M. 1980. Steering for dream: Dream concepts of the Makiritare. Journal of Latin American Lore 6:297–312.
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Describes the use of dreams to guide behavior by the Makiritare, a Yekuana-speaking people of Venezuela. They engage in communal dream-sharing sessions on a daily basis to analyze their dreams for good and bad omens.
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Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement. American Ethnologist 34:3–24.
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While not focused on dreaming—Kohn’s argument is that anthropology should move “beyond the human” to consider the complex relationships between all life-forms—this groundbreaking article starts with the observation that the Runa of upper Amazonia use dogs’ dreams, as well as people’s dreams, to predict success at hunting.
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Tedlock, Barbara. 1999. Sharing and interpreting dreams in Amerindian nations. In Dream cultures: Explorations in the comparative history of dreaming. Edited by David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, 87–103. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Surveys differences and similarities in the indigenous theories and practices concerning dreams among many peoples from across the Americas, including (among others) the Aguaruna, Hupdu Maku, Kagwahiv, Kalapalo, Mapuche, Maya, Navajo, Ojibwa, Quechua, Rarámuri, Sharanahua, Xavante, and Zuni. The use of dreams to predict the future is a common theme.
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Dreams and Drug-Induced Visions of Amerindians

Oneiromancy—the use of dreams to predict the future—is one common feature of Amerindian beliefs about dreams. Another is the lack of any conceptual or semantic distinction between dreams and visions, which are deliberately induced (whether for their ability to predict the future, or for their healing powers) by ingesting hallucinogenic plants. The relationship between dreams and visions has been particularly well studied for the Jivaroan peoples of the Amazon headwaters, including the Shuar (Harner 1972, Rubenstein 2012) and the Aguaruna (Brown 1985). Visions are often, but by no means always, associated with shamans: Harner 1972 describes Aguaruna shamans’ attempts to seek out visionary encounters with their warrior ancestors, which to some extent parallels the “vision quests” of Plains Indians in North America (Irwin 1994). On the other hand, Rubenstein 2012 emphasizes that among the Shuar, everyone ingests hallucinogens on almost a daily basis—even children are fed gradually increasing doses from birth—such that it is impossible to grasp the Shuar understanding of reality without considering the influence of their hallucinations. In other societies, such as the Kagwahiv of the Madeira river in central Brazil (Kracke 1992, Kracke 2006), visions and trance starts were formerly associated with shamans, but seem to have become more widespread in the general population with the recent decline in traditional shamanic practices.

Brown, Michael F. 1985. Tsewa’s gift: Magic and meaning in an Amazonian society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
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Discusses dreams and drug-induced visions among the Aguaruna, a Jivaroan people of the upper Amazon. The same Aguaruna verb is used for both types of experience: the key element of its meaning seems to be a certain privacy of experience, coupled with drowsiness and often with lying down.
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Harner, Michael J. 1972. The Jívaro: People of the sacred waterfalls. London: Robert Hale.
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The first English-language ethnography of a Jivaroan people (the Shuar) describes how Shuar shamans have no formal authority except in the spheres of healing and of visionary knowledge. To gain this, they deliberately seek out visionary encounters with an ancient “warrior soul,” which may also appear to them in dreams.
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Irwin, Lee. 1994. Dreams, theory, and culture: The Plains Vision Quest paradigm. American Indian Quarterly 18:229–245.
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A review of the literature on Plains Indian dreams and visions, arguing that the importance of dreams for Native American religion has been marginalized by most anthropologists. Both dreams and deliberately sought visions embody a holistic connection between the spiritual world and the world of everyday experience.
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Kracke, Waud H. 1992. He who dreams: The nocturnal source of transforming power in Kagwahiv shamanism. In Portals of power: Shamanism in South America. Edited by E. Jean Mattesson Langdon and Gerhard Baer, 127–148. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
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Shamanism among the Kagwahiv (a Tupi-speaking people of central Brazil) has almost died out, but in former times shamans used to gain healing power from being visited by spirits while in trance—a state of mind considered by the Kagwahiv to be very similar to dreaming.
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Kracke, Waud H. 2006. To dream, perchance to cure: Dreaming and shamanism in a Brazilian indigenous society. Social Analysis 50:106–120.
DOI: 10.3167/015597706780810943Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Dream interpretation among the Parintintin (Kagwahiv) people used to be the preserve of shamans, but nowadays everyone is thought to have the ability to gain insights into their future from dreams. This article describes how one informant, while not a shaman himself, experienced a shaman’s cosmic journey in dreams.
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Rubenstein, Steven Lee. 2012. On the importance of visions among the Amazonian Shuar. Current Anthropology 53:39–79.
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Uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to analyze the visions of the Shuar, which are induced by hallucinogenic plants consumed by everyone (even children). Because visions are ubiquitously influential, yet their contents are secret, Rubenstein sees them as indicative of a tension between a desire for freedom and a desire for power.
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Access to Supernatural Agents

A common theme of dreams around the world is the idea that they give real access to supernatural agents—especially ancestral spirits. Probably the first anthropologist to recognize the importance of this was Erika Bourguignon, who in the 1950s in Bourguignon 1954 demonstrated the continuity between Haitian peasants’ beliefs about dreams and their beliefs about trance and spirit possession. People in many societies distinguish between dreamed meetings with recently deceased spirits (who are typically known to the dreamer), and with more remote ancestors (who may be known through myth, or hitherto unfamiliar to them). Interestingly, the recently deceased, even though familiar, are often seen as more frightening, while the remote ancestors may be more auspicious, as among the Arapesh of New Guinea (Tuzin 1975). On the other hand, villagers in the Peruvian Andes sometimes gain comfort from dream-meetings with relatives killed in armed conflict (Cecconi 2011). Rural Japanese women see ancestor spirits as friendly guardians of their families, who come to them in dreams to warn them that something is wrong with a family member. These dream encounters can thus prompt them to take action to improve the family situation, just as Guajiro Indians often act under the influence of ancestors encountered in dreams (Perrin 1987), and Greek islanders are prompted by dreams of saints to dig up archaeological artifacts (Stewart 2012)!

Bourguignon, Erika E. 1954. Dreams and dream interpretation in Haiti. American Anthropologist 56:262–268.
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Among Haitian peasants, dreams are classified either as “things I see at night” (often, childhood nightmares) and supernatural visitations. The latter are not really distinguished from waking encounters with possessed individuals or with omens.
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Cecconi, Arianna. 2011. Dreams, memory, and war: An ethnography of night in the Peruvian Andes. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 16:401–424.
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Describes how people in the Ayacucho region of central Peru (which has suffered greatly from the conflict with the Shining Path movement) often dream about soldiers they knew who died in the war. These visitations are considered to be manifestations of the Apu (the “Spirit of the Mountain”).
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Perrin, Michel. 1987. The way of the dead Indians: Guajiro myths and symbols. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
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Originally published in French in 1976, this collection of folklore and oral history from the Guajiro Peninsula (on the border between Colombia and Venezuela) includes frequent references to people acting under the influence of dreams, especially those that involve encounters with dead ancestors. Translated by Michael Fineberg.
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Stewart, Charles. 2012. Dreaming and historical consciousness in island Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Villagers on Naxos commonly experience dreams of saints directing them to dig up buried objects, reflecting and reshaping a profound engagement with their own history and archaeology.
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Traphagan, John W. 2003. Older women as caregivers and ancestral protection in rural Japan. Ethnology 42:127–139.
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Rural Japanese people believe that ancestral spirits serve as protectors of the living, citing as evidence dreams in which ancestors appear. Although men and young people also have such dreams, they are especially important for older women, who take them as a sign that something is amiss with their relatives.
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Tuzin, Donald. 1975. The breath of a ghost: Dreams and the fear of the dead. Ethos 3:555–578.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.1975.3.4.02a00050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Describes how the Ilahita Arapesh of northeastern New Guinea distinguish between several types of ghost encountered in dreams, according to the degree of familiarity they had with them when they were alive, and treat encounters with ghosts (which are terrifying) very differently from encounters with ancestors (which are considered auspicious).
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Dreaming as Revelation in World Religions

Complementary to their role as a means of contacting the ancestors in small-scale societies, dreams in the context of world religions have often been seen as a means of obtaining revelation from gods and other powerful supernatural agents. Bulkeley 2008 is a voluminous textbook on this theme, covering not only the world’s six biggest religions but also various traditional religions on four continents. One omission is Judaism, which is covered to some extent by the account in Pilch 2011 of dreams and visions of heavenly journeys in the Bible. Islam has been a particularly fruitful research area for students of dreaming: Edgar 2011 is a comprehensive historical survey of how dreams have been used for centuries in Islamic political argument; Ewing 1990 recounts how Pakistani men are often inspired by dreams of a Sufi to become a disciple of the same individual; and Mittermaier 2010 shows how modern Egyptian dream interpreters are able to integrate European theoretical influences with Islamic traditions. Turning to Buddhism, Young 1999 does a similar job to Edgar 2011 for Islam in covering the entire history of how dreams have been used in Buddhist traditions. Power is a surprisingly common theme of the use of dreams in religion, perhaps because the private, unverifiable nature of the dream means that dreamers can represent themselves as having privileged access to supernatural beings: for example, Curley 1983 shows reports of revelatory dreams serve as competitive displays of spiritual worth in a West African Christian church. Finally, Bulkeley 2007 finds similar themes in the dreams that US undergraduates describe as personally significant and the dreams that are recorded as significant in various religious traditions, raising the possibility that humans may be predisposed to find spiritual significance in certain kinds of dream experience.

Bulkeley, Kelly. 2007. Sacred sleep: Scientific contributions to the study of religiously significant dreaming. In The new science of dreaming. Vol. 3, Cultural and theoretical perspectives. Edited by Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara, 71–94. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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In a content analysis of the dreams of US undergraduates, Bulkeley finds similar themes to those that are often associated with dreaming in many of the world’s religious traditions. In particular, recurrent themes of nightmares and of mystical dreams give qualified support to Antti Revonsuo’s threat simulation theory of dreaming.
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Bulkeley, Kelly. 2008. Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York: New York Univ. Press.
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An impressively comprehensive survey of dreaming in many religions (there are chapters on Chinese religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman religion, and traditional African, Amerindian, and Oceanian religions). Common themes of religious dreams everywhere include communication with sacred beings, gaining wisdom, and healing suffering.
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Curley, Richard. 1983. Dreams of power: Social process in a West African religious movement. Africa 53:20–37.
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A sociological analysis of the importance of dreams to a Christian sect (the True Church of God) operating in Nigeria and Cameroon. The focus is on dream narrations as public performances that reflect the social organization of the sect and serve as politically competitive demonstrations of the dreamers’ religious commitment.
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Edgar, Iain R. 2011. The dream in Islam: From Qur’anic tradition to jihadist inspiration. New York: Berghahn.
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Analyzes debates surrounding the role of prophetic dreams in Islam, both in historical and in modern contexts. Shows that claims to revelation in dreams have often been used for political purposes, including by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
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Ewing, Katherine P. 1990. The dream of spiritual initiation and the organization of self representations among Pakistani Sufis. American Ethnologist 17:56–74.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Pakistani men sometimes have dreams of a spiritual teacher, which cause them to go on a search for the teacher in waking life so that they can become their disciple. Ewing argues that the dream serves as an indexical sign of an impending transformation in their self-representation.
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Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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An ethnography of contemporary Muslim dream interpretation in pre–Arab Spring Cairo. Mittermaier highlights both the diversity of dream interpretation in this modern megacity, and its transcultural influences, as evidenced by Muslim dream interpreters who draw on Freudian theory.
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Pilch, John J. 2011. Flights of the soul: Visions, heavenly journeys, and peak experiences in the biblical world. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
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An “Altered States of Consciousness” account of references to “sky journeys” in the Bible (particularly in Ezekiel, Enoch, and Matthew) that relates these to forms of dreaming such as lucid dreaming (in which the sleeper is consciously in control of the dream content).
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Young, Serinity. 1999. Dreaming in the lotus: Buddhist dream narrative, imagery, and practice. Boston: Wisdom.
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A wide-ranging history of the importance of dreams in various Buddhist traditions, ranging from early biographies of the Buddha, through Indo-Tibetan dream theories and practices, to modern innovations in areas such as “dream yoga” and rituals to ward off bad dreams.
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Dreams and Cultural Change/Continuity

A perhaps surprisingly common theme in social studies of dreaming, which has certain parallels with political claims of dreams as revelations in the religious sphere, is the deployment of dreams to help either effect cultural change or maintain cultural continuity. While focusing on dreaming in African religions, the collection of articles in Jȩdrej and Shaw 1992 includes numerous examples of social change inspired by revelatory dreams. McGee 2012 also has a religious focus, looking at dreams as a source of liturgical innovation in Haiti. Dreams can also be implicated in processes of urbanization (Watson and Watson-Franke 1977) and globalization (Hollan 2005), revealing people’s internal conflicts as they struggle to come to terms with a new, acculturated identity. Lohmann 2000 makes the cogent point that dreams can provide direct experiential validation of new cultural references, and thus are potentially of great importance in religious enculturation in general. In contrast, Tedlock 1992 shows how Maya dreams and visions have been used to reinvigorate traditional shamanic religion. In fact, dreams provided a semiotic resource for reconciling traditional religion with Catholicism, which is reminiscent of how the dreams of Melanesian cargo cult leaders have encouraged them to combine traditional and Christian elements (Stephen 1979). These religious cases are perhaps examples of more general processes in which ancestral spirits (who after all tend to be seen as timeless rather than past) are invoked as demanding change from present-day people, as among the Western Australian Aboriginals described in Glaskin 2005.

Glaskin, Katie. 2005. Innovation and ancestral revelation: The case of dreams. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:297–314.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2005.00237.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
For many Australian Aboriginals, ancestral figures use dreams to communicate to the dreamer that contemporary people should behave differently. There is thus a complex dialectic between traditional beliefs and cultural change, which Glaskin illustrates with the case of changes to the card game among the Bardi Aboriginals of Western Australia.
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Hollan, Douglas. 2005. Dreaming in a global world. In A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and psychocultural change. Edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton, 90–102. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470996409Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shows how globalization has affected the embodied organization of the self-concept in constrained yet flexible ways, as illustrated by dreams from New Guinea, Samoa, and urban California. These “selfscape dreams” are thus a window on how the global becomes internalized, gaining emotional saliency and directive force for people’s actions.
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Jȩdrej, M. C., and Rosalind Shaw, eds. 1992. Dreaming, religion and society in Africa. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
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A collection of articles on the importance of dreaming in African religion. A common theme is the involvement of dreamed “revelations” in social change. Individual chapters report on Berti, Igbo, Temne, Tukolor, Yansi, Yoruba, and Zezuru religious dreams. The final chapter covers dreaming in African Christian contexts.
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Lohmann, Roger Ivar. 2000. The role of dreams in religious enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. Ethos 28:75–102.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.2000.28.1.75Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Suggests that the importance of dreams in cultural transmission has been underestimated. Dreams allow people to verify, at a direct experiential level, the reality of new cultural information (especially supernatural beings). Lohmann illustrates his argument with examples of Asabano dreams around the time of their conversion to Christianity.
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McGee, Adam M. 2012. Dreaming in Haitian Vodou: Vouchsafe, guide, and source of liturgical novelty. Dreaming 22:83–100.
DOI: 10.1037/a0026691Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Uses Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality to examine how dreams are used as a source of liturgical innovation in the Vodou religion. Dreams can also be used by Haitians as a form of divination and a vouchsafe for belief. Includes dreamed responses to the 2010 earthquake.
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Stephen, Michele. 1979. Dreams of change: The innovative role of altered states of consciousness in traditional Melanesian religion. Oceania 50:3–22.
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Argues that although Melanesian dreaming has received little attention from anthropologists, it actually illustrates some of the ways in which “cargo cults” maintain continuity with the historical religions of the region. This literature review presents examples of significant dreams that led individuals to become cult leaders.
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Tedlock, Barbara. 1992. The role of dreams and visionary narratives in Mayan cultural survival. Ethos 20:453–476.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.1992.20.4.02a00030Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Dreams and visions among both highland and lowland Maya have been used to reinvigorate traditional “shamanic” religion, helping to convince catechists (who had favored a strict Roman Catholicism) to embrace elements of the old ways.
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Watson, Lawrence C., and Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke. 1977. Spirits, dreams, and the resolution of conflict among urban Guajiro women. Ethos 5:388–408.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.1977.5.4.02a00020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Guajiro women feel threatened by urbanization, which has cut them off from their kinswomen and given their husbands more opportunities for infidelity. Their dreams, which often include frightening encounters with powerful spirits, reflect these anxieties and the resulting social conflict.
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Cross-Cultural Studies of Dreaming

Psychologists have not undertaken any systematic program of research into cultural differences and similarities in dreaming, but nonetheless some of the rather ad hoc collection of studies listed here may be interesting to anthropologists. An early example of a cross-cultural study is Griffith, et al. 1958, which finds broad similarities, along with a few minor differences, in the dreams of Japanese and US undergraduates. Kane 1994 also finds many similarities in dream content between African-American, Anglo-American, and Mexican-American students. However, Levine 1991 shows that there were notable differences in how Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children represented conflict in dreams (it is not clear whether this was due to Levine making a finer-grained analysis of a specific type of dream, or because she did not rely on samples of undergraduates, who may be quite homogeneous between geographical locations). The anthropologists Jeannette Marie Mageo and Douglas Hollan have both crossed over into cultural psychology to some extent, with Mageo 2002 arguing that Samoan dreaming constitutes a kind of cognition about cultural motifs, and Hollan 2013 finding similarities in the emotional effects of dreaming between California and Indonesia. Finally, there is some potential to use the DreamBank corpus of dreams (Schneider and Domhoff n.d.) for cross-cultural research, since although the dreams in this corpus are mainly from US informants, it does also include large corpuses of German and Peruvian dreams.

Griffith, Richard M., Otoya Miyagi, and Akira Tago. 1958. The universality of typical dreams: Japanese vs. Americans. American Anthropologist 60:1173–1179.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1958.60.6.02a00110Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A quantitative content analysis of the results of a dream questionnaire administered to undergraduates in Kentucky and Tokyo. There are some differences in gender effects between the two groups, but overall, the same themes (e.g., killing someone) recur in similar proportions.
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Hollan, Douglas. 2013. Sleeping, dreaming, and health in rural Indonesia and the urban US: A cultural and experiential approach. Social Science and Medicine 79:23–30.
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.05.006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The effects of dreaming on health are often neglected, yet the “emotional residues” of the night can deeply influence behavior the next day. This applies both to the Toraja of Sulawesi, where Hollan carried out ethnographic fieldwork, and the inhabitants of Southern California, where he has a part-time psychoanalytic practice.
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Kane, Connie M. 1994. Differences in the manifest dream content of African‐American, Anglo‐American, and Mexican‐American college women. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 22:203–209.
DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1912.1994.tb00253.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In a quantitative content analysis of a dream diary, Kane finds strong similarities between the dreams of the three groups of students, in terms of the characters, emotions, social interactions, and outcomes involved. The only significant difference is that African-American women tended to dream about being in more passive roles.
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Levine, Julia B. 1991. The role of culture in the representation of conflict in dreams: A comparison of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 22:472–490.
DOI: 10.1177/0022022191224003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using a mainstream psychoanalytic approach, Levine looks for cultural differences in the manifest content of dreams about conflict in three groups of children. She finds differences in four dimensions: self-representations, other-representations, realism, and the nature of the conflict depicted in the dream.
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Mageo, Jeannette Marie. 2002. Intertextual interpretation, fantasy and Samoan dreams. Culture and Psychology 8:417–448.
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X0284009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In a well-stated argument for the importance of dreams, Mageo analyzes Samoan dream narratives with regard to motifs that they share with other familiar but fantastic stories within this culture, such as founding myths. For Mageo, recombination of motifs in dreams represents real thought about what the motifs mean.
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Schneider, Adam, and G. William Domhoff. n.d. DreamBank.
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A collection of over 20,000 dream reports, freely available online, that can be analyzed using a built-in search engine and statistical package.
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Dreams and Dreamwork in Modern Western Culture

Several anthropologists have turned their ethnographic understandings of dreaming onto their own cultures. Some have investigated the increasingly popular practice of dreamwork, which involves discussion of group members’ dreams so as to promote creative and health outcomes (Domhoff 1990; Edgar 1995; Hillman 1999), in a more open, collaborative, and informal way than with psychoanalytic dream therapy. Dombeck 1991 examines psychotherapists’ and associated professionals’ understandings of their own dreams and how they relate to their jobs. Also in the domain of health issues, Repede 2009 argues that an awareness of the holistic nature of dreaming could improve nurses’ sense of care for their patients. Closer to mainstream psychology, Mageo 2006 analyzes US undergraduates’ dreams with respect to powerful American cultural motifs such as the car. Ewing 1994 explores the dilemmas of an ethnographer whose attempts at objectivity and Western scientific understanding of dreaming were undermined by her own dreams, which fit better with her Pakistani informants’ more “mystical” expectations of dreaming. Finally, Richman 2000 produces a difficult auto-ethnography of the author’s own experiences in an intensive care ward.

Dombeck, Mary. 1991. Dreams and professional personhood: The contexts of dream telling and dream interpretation among American psychotherapists. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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An ethnography of dream telling and dream interpretation at two community mental health centers in the northeastern United States. Data comes from interviews with medical technicians, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, secretaries, and social workers about their differing senses of professional personhood. A fascinating appendix contains the employees’ narrative reports of their dreams.
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Domhoff, G. William. 1990. The mystique of dreams: A search for Utopia through Senoi dream theory. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Explores the origins of the modern American practice of “dreamwork” in the 1960s “human potential” movement, which was inspired by the popular anthropologist Kilton Stewart’s reports from Malaysia of Senoi dream theory. Stewart claimed that Senoi practices of lucid dreaming contributed to their outstanding mental health. Domhoff disputes this.
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Edgar, Iain. 1995. Dreamwork, anthropology and the caring professions: A cultural approach to dreamwork. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
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A guide for therapists and other professionals on how to apply recent anthropological and psychological theories of dreaming to the practice of dreamwork.
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Ewing, Katherine P. 1994. Dreams from a saint: Anthropological atheism and the temptation to believe. American Anthropologist 96:571–583.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses Ewing’s temptation to “go native” during her ethnography of Sufism in Pakistan. Sufis (“saints”) are commonly thought to appear to potential followers in dreams. Having initially attempted to maintain a detached, objective attitude toward this belief, Ewing’s scepticism is shaken when she starts dreaming about a Sufi herself.
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Hillman, Deborah Jay. 1999. Dream work and field work: Linking cultural anthropology and the current dream work movement. In The variety of dream experience: Expanding our ways of working with dreams. 2d ed. Edited by Montague Ullman and Claire Limmer, 65–90. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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In a book primarily intended for dream workers rather than academics, anthropologist and dream worker Hillman considers how anthropologists might study the burgeoning social phenomenon of dreamwork in the United States. Includes a brief history of the dreamwork movement.
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Mageo, Jeannette Marie. 2006. Figurative dream analysis and US traveling identities. Ethos 34:456–487.
DOI: 10.1525/eth.2006.34.4.456Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Presents a method for analyzing collections of dream reports that Mageo calls “figurative analysis.” She illustrates the method with an analysis of over 300 US undergraduate dreams, revealing a frequently appearing figure of the car, which represents the dreamer’s traveling identity.
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Repede, Elizabeth J. 2009. Participatory dreaming: A conceptual exploration from a unitary appreciative inquiry perspective. Nursing Science Quarterly 22:360–368.
DOI: 10.1177/0894318409344752Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Points out that use of dreams to promote healing is a recurrent cross-cultural phenomenon. For Repede, dreams’ healing power stems from their participatory nature, meaning that they partake of a universal consciousness outside of the dreamer’s head. Awareness of the participatory nature of dreaming can promote more holistic nursing.
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Richman, Joel. 2000. Coming out of intensive care crazy: Dreams of affliction. Qualitative Health Research 10:84–102.
DOI: 10.1177/104973200129118264Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In a deeply personal and actually quite harrowing account, ethnographic sociologist Richman describes his traumatized experiences after waking up from a seven-week coma in an Intensive Care unit. Dreams—particularly nightmares—figure prominently, as Richman relates their content to that of shamanistic flights of ecstasy.
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