Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming

This volume offers a comparative, cross-cultural history of dreams. The essays examine a wide range of texts concerning dreams, as culled from a rich variety of religious contexts: China, India, the Americas, classical Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, and medieval Judaism and Islam. Taken together, these pieces constitute an important first step toward a new understanding of the differences and similarities between the ways in which different cultures experience the universal yet utterly unique world of dreams.

Times Literary Supplement

. . . [D]reams, once told, are interpreted according to cultural expectations, and depend for their meaning on the way a particular society differentiates dreams from other forms of mental activity, such as fantasy, ecstatic vision, or memory. Where there is a sense of a bounded self, the dream-world will differ from that of a culture which imagines a self permeable to cosmic forces. In the Western tradition, dreams are thought of primarily as visual experiences, while among Amerindians the aural aspect is more significant, especially when an animal speaks to the dreamer. . . .

According to classical Hindu thought, discussed by Wendy Doniger, the apparent universe is a dream dreamt by God. Dreams offer a moment for human beings to coincide with the cosmic plan and so may be valid sources of insight into reality. Bhrama (illusion) can be the key to brahma (the cosmos), as Doniger pithily puts it. This resonates with the seventeenth-century Puritan conviction that dreams could be a means of connecting to the prelapsarian world. . . . .

both at Hebrew University of Jerusalem