The Dream in Western Culture

THE DREAM IN WESTERN CULTURE is an anthropological and historical investigation of conceptions of the dream (its meanings, connections with other ideas, and uses) in Western culture from Greco-Roman times to the present. A byproduct of mammalian biology, dreaming is universal among humans, but cultures differ in how they define and use it. In the West, “the dream” emerged as a significant symbol that provides a window on Western conceptions of divinity, humanity, health, knowledge, and power as shaped by an underlying structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Homeric conception of the dream as a messenger from the gods (whose complex behavior provided a mythological charter for a unified human self that contained both good and evil) gave way, with the rise of Christianity, to an absolutist model in which the true self (good, god-fearing, rational, masculine, creative, conscious, white/Western, etc.) was bifurcated from the untrue self (evil, humanistic, irrational, feminine, unconscious, non-white/non-Western), the categories of “true” and “untrue” dependent on what was considered important in a particular historical era. How we think about dreams in the West is affected by this underlying cultural structure. Originally published under the title DREAM AND CULTURE: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE WESTERN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, the second edition includes two additional chapters that provide biographical information about the author's introduction to dream studies in the sleep lab of Allan Hobson and Fred Snyder at the National Institutes of Health during the 1960s, and how, during her career as an anthropologist and writer, she applied this experience to an understanding of play, creativity, and poetry.