Among the small communities of hunter-gatherers, dream sharing is widespread. The entities within their world (animals, plants, etc.) were regarded as sentient, responsive beings, with whom discourse could be established via dreams, visions, and trances, together with song, dance, and ritual. Their temporal orientation was mythic/ paradigmatic (kairotic) rather than chronologic, so that creation could continually be recurring. In critical contrast, high Western intellectual thought-post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment-has been increasingly disenchanted, materialistic, reductionist, and routinized (Max Weber) and has approached dreams as the product of "the brain" of an individuated actor. In opposition to such formalized intellectualistic approaches, oppositional groups have revived the reverence for dreams and the practice of dream sharing. The evanescent character of dreams, and their creative aesthetic qualities, reveal their origin in the psyche of social beings and their tension with the self-system.
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