Dream sharing as social practice.

Abstract

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.

Dreaming and Reality: A Neuroanthropological Account

“…62-66;Laughlin, McManus & d'Aquili, 1990, p. 293). In modern materialistic, technocratic societies, children are typically taught to disattend to their dreams and to focus on waking interactions with the external physical and social world (see Mageo, 2003b;Wax, 2004). Children are taught from infancy that dreams are not real-that they are a fiction ("just a dream")-and that they just happen for no apparent reason and can be ignored.…”

“…There are refreshing exceptions, of course. Murray L. Wax (1998Wax ( , 2004) has thought about dreaming in both its neurobiological and its sociocultural contexts and has noted that modern neuroscience removes the experience of dreaming from the limited context of the intimate social relations and ethos of the dreamer and re-frames dreaming as a cognitive process:…”

Dreaming as a story-telling instinct

“…A keen interest in dreams among some hunter-gatherer societies is exemplified by the practice of dream sharing (Wax, 2004). Dreams are sometimes recounted as experiences from another, parallel existence.…”

Participatory Dreaming

“…Dreaming and other states of non-waking or altered states of consciousness may in fact be normal, yet extraordinary ways of appreciating life patterning within a unitary appreciative perspective (Cowling, 2001;Watson, 1999). Dreams can be collective, communal, and emancipatory, as well as individual (Jung, 1964;Wax, 2004). While individual dreaming has been extensively studied in the literature (Harris & Lane, 2003), the participatory nature of dreaming as a unitary phenomenon is limited.…”