Dreaming is a universal human experience which has raised profound questions about human nature, destiny, experience and episte-mology since the beginning of history. The earliest preserved dream topic is an Egyptian papyrus dated roughly to 2000 bc that presents a catalogue of images seen in dreams alongside their interpretations, divided into good and bad prophecies. If a man saw himself drinking wine or copulating with his mother, for instance, these were auspicious dreams; the first indicated ‘living in righteousness’ while the second meant that his ‘clansmen will cleave fast to him’. Seeing himself drinking warm beer or copulating with a jerboa were bad dreams and meant ‘suffering would come upon him’ and ‘the passing of a judgement against him’ respectively (Lewis 1976).
Through Greco-Roman times dreams continued to be considered primarily as a means of prophesying the future. Probably the most complete manual of dream interpretation to survive was written by the second-century ad professional dream interpreter Artemidorus. Artemidorus was very much an empiricist who considered it important to travel and to consider closely the context of a given dreamer’s vision. In his opinion traditional dream-interpreting keys often needed to be modified case by case. As an example he presented three different ways of interpreting a man’s recurrent dream of not having a nose. The first time it meant that he would lose his perfume business; the second time it predicted that he would be convicted of forgery and exiled (facial disfiguration signifying disgrace); and finally this dream predicted his imminent death since the skull of a dead man has no nose (1975).
Artemidorus was aware that many esteemed thinkers, especially Aristotle and his followers, dismissed the idea that dreams could have prophetic qualities. On this view, dreams were entirely personal thoughts, primarily the residues of waking experiences, anxieties and desires which came to the fore during sleep. Artemi-dorus acknowledged this tradition of scepticism, but side-stepped it by classifying dreams into different types. Those generated by mundane, personal physiological causes such as inebriation, heat, or indigestion were labelled enypnia and were not prophetic and thus not worth interpreting; they referred mainly to the present. Other dreams, called oneiroi, were prophetic and Artemidorus left open the possibility that these could be sent by gods. For the next 1,500 years the Western tradition would fluctuate between viewing dreams as the products of individuals’ physical and mental states, or as the results of supernatural visitation.
As Christianity spread during the Middle Ages, the Church sought to consolidate its authority by allowing that only the extremely devoted could have prophetic dreams. The dreams of the ordinary laity were approached with suspicion as possible emanations of the devil. The future belonged to God to reveal to those who had achieved spiritual progress and who had, furthermore, developed the faculty ofdiscernment which enabled them to decide the meaning and the divine or demonic provenance of dreams (Le Goff 1988).
At the beginning of the Enlightenment the understanding of dream experiences played an important role in displacing medieval theo-centrism and establishing the precepts of natural science. After a dream on 10 November 1619, Descartes began to meditate on the possibility that the physical world was only a dream. The refutation of this idea led to his famous cogito ergo sum, the cornerstone of the rationalist movement which posited a clear distinction between mental and physical worlds; between fantasy and reality. The dream could thus be seen as a linchpin of Western epistemology, enabling the distinction between unreal forms of thought and the mechanically governed real world.
As anthropology developed in the nineteenth century under the influence of evolutionism, the Cartesian view of dreams served as a means of distinguishing ‘lower’ levels of culture from the civilized culture of Northern Europe. As Tylor explained in his Primitive Culture (1871: 445), ‘the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education’. In turn, attempts to explain and understand dreams involving ghosts and nature spirits motivated the elaboration of animism, the characteristically ‘primitive’ belief in the manifold operation of souls in both the human and natural worlds. The French philosopher/anthropologist Levy-Bruhl disagreed with Tylor as to whether ‘primitives’ actually confused subjective with objective phenomena, but nevertheless pointed to their credence in dream visions as exemplifying ‘mystical participation’, a cornerstone of what he termed ‘pre-logical mentality’. As he put it: ‘Instead of saying, as people do, that primitives believe in what they perceive in the dream although it is but a dream, I should say that they believe in it because it is a dream’ (Levy-Bruhl 1985 [1910]: 59).
Sigmund Freud’s monumental The Interpretation of Dreams (1953 [1900]) considered dreams to be the expressions of unconscious desires, distorted and encoded so as to elude the censorship of consciousness. His position continued the Aristotelian tradition of treating dreams as wholly personal matters. In diametrical opposition to Artemidorus and other ancient interpreters, dreams were not about predicting the future, but rather about uncovering an individual’s past. The dominance of Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective on dreams was such that anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century largely conceded the topic of dreams to psychology, or else restricted themselves to empirical descriptions of dreaming in particular societies. This in spite of the fact that a psychoanalytic approach says nothing about the meaning which particular cultures attribute to dreams. A Freudian would examine the earlier mentioned Egyptian dream of copulating with one’s mother and discern in it an expression of the putatively universal Oedipus complex. Such an interpretation may be correct at one level, but it runs roughshod over the meaning which the ancient Egyptians attributed to this dream, namely that it beneficially signified kin cooperation.
While concerned with the comparative ethnographic probing of Freud’s universal theory of the unconscious, J.S. Lincoln (1935) nonetheless mapped out several useful interrogatives for future sociocultural anthropological research. It was not until the late 1980s that numerous studies began to appear which, following Lincoln, considered the cultural significance of dreams as well as the practical social and political ends to which they may be applied (Tedlock 1987; Jedrej and Shaw 1992).
