Cultures & Dream Interpretations
One of the great privileges of my younger years was being able to travel. Before eventually settling on the West Coast, I spent months at a time moving through Asia, North Africa, South America, Europe and the Middle East. Inevitably, I became fascinated by the differences between cultures: the languages people spoke, the food they ate, their religious beliefs and the countless little customs that made one place feel completely different from another. Yet there were also experiences that seemed to follow me everywhere. Dreams were one of them. I could be talking with a Buddhist monk in northern Thailand, drinking mint tea with a family in Morocco, listening to Indigenous people in Peru or sitting with university students in Scotland, and sooner or later somebody would have a story about a dream. Sometimes these stories were told seriously, sometimes with humour and occasionally with genuine awe. Those conversations left a lasting impression on me. Everyone dreams, but what we think our dreams mean depends enormously upon where we come from.
This is one reason dreams are so interesting from an anthropological perspective. Every culture develops ways of making sense of experiences that are mysterious or difficult to explain, and dreaming almost demands some sort of explanation. While we're asleep, the normal boundaries between memory, imagination, emotion and perception seem to disappear. We find ourselves asking very basic questions. Where did that come from? Why did I dream about that person? Does it mean anything? Should I pay attention to it? The answers a culture provides often tell us something about much larger beliefs concerning religion, nature, identity and even the boundary between the visible and invisible worlds.
In a number of Indigenous traditions, dreams have historically been regarded as meaningful experiences rather than simply random activity taking place in the sleeping brain. Among some Native American peoples, for example, dreams and visions could be associated with ancestors, spiritual beings or the natural world. Certain traditions included vision quests involving solitude, fasting and prayer, although practices and beliefs differed greatly between nations and shouldn't be treated as if there were a single Native American understanding of dreams. What I find particularly interesting is the broader idea that a dream need not belong exclusively to the dreamer. Its significance might also be understood in relation to family, community, ancestors or the surrounding environment.
I encountered something of this way of thinking while travelling through Peru many years ago. Conversations about dreams could sit quite comfortably alongside conversations about family, landscape and spiritual practice. The boundaries I had grown accustomed to in Western thought weren't always drawn in quite the same places. Dreams could exist within a larger network of relationships involving people, ancestors, animals, mountains and places understood to have particular significance. Anthropologists sometimes describe such perspectives as relational worldviews. The individual isn't imagined as completely separate from everything around them, but as part of a much larger set of relationships.
Chinese traditions offer another fascinating way of approaching dreams. Dreams have been discussed and interpreted in China for thousands of years, sometimes in relation to health, balance and the condition of the individual. Daoist ideas, and later Buddhist influences, provided ways of thinking about dreaming that weren't necessarily concerned with straightforward predictions of the future. A dream might instead invite reflection upon one's present condition. Rather than only asking, "What is going to happen to me?", the more interesting question could be, "What does this tell me about how I am now?" That seems entirely consistent with philosophical traditions concerned with harmony, balance and the relationship between complementary forces such as Yin and Yang.
India provides yet another perspective. Dreaming appears in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions, sometimes as part of much larger discussions about consciousness itself. The Upanishads, for example, consider waking, dreaming and deep sleep when exploring the nature of awareness and reality. I find this particularly fascinating because the dream isn't simply something to be interpreted. Dreaming becomes a philosophical problem in its own right. If an experience seems completely real while we're dreaming, what does that tell us about perception? Buddhist traditions approach these questions in different ways, but frequently emphasize observing mental experiences without becoming overly attached to them. A dream arises and disappears, much as thoughts and emotions do while we're awake.
Dreams & The Abrahamic Religions
Dreams also have a prominent place within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Hebrew Bible contains some of the best-known dream stories in Western culture. Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dreams, while Jacob famously dreams of a ladder reaching between earth and heaven. Dreams also appear at important moments in Christian scripture, including those involving Joseph around the birth of Jesus. Islamic traditions likewise contain a long history of discussion about significant dreams, and Muslim scholars developed approaches to their interpretation while also recognizing that not everything experienced during sleep should automatically be regarded as prophetic. That qualification is important. Even within cultures where dreams could carry religious significance, people weren't necessarily expected to treat every strange night-time image as a message from God.
I remember being struck by something similar during my first visits to Morocco. Dreams could enter ordinary conversations quite naturally. People sometimes made distinctions between the confused dreams produced by everyday experiences and those they felt might deserve more serious attention. I found this refreshing because it was far more nuanced than the stereotype that "traditional" cultures automatically regard every dream as supernatural. People could be interested in dreams without being uncritical about them. Context mattered.
The Ancient Greeks approached dreaming in another remarkable way. At sanctuaries associated with Asclepius, the god of healing, people seeking relief from illness could participate in rituals before sleeping at the sanctuary. Dreams experienced there might then become part of the healing process and be discussed or interpreted. Looking at these practices today, it's tempting to force them into either a religious or psychological category. The Greeks themselves didn't necessarily make that distinction in the way we do. Healing, religion and dreaming could occupy the same space.
Then, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western psychology changed the conversation dramatically. Freud famously regarded dreams as expressions of unconscious wishes and conflicts, although often in disguised form. Jung took dream interpretation in a somewhat different direction, giving greater importance to symbolism, archetypes and the individual's psychological development. The source of mystery had effectively moved. Instead of asking whether a dream came from a god or spirit, psychologists increasingly asked what might be happening within the unconscious mind. We hadn't really eliminated the mystery of dreaming; we had relocated it.
Anthropology has taught me to be cautious about treating any one of these explanations as though it automatically makes all the others irrelevant. Neuroscience can investigate what the brain is doing while we dream. Psychology can examine relationships between dreaming, memory, emotion and mental life. Anthropology asks a rather different question: what do people believe is happening when they dream, and why does that belief make sense within their culture? These approaches don't always have to compete. Often they're simply looking at different parts of the same extraordinarily complicated human experience.
Common Dream Themes Across Cultures
What becomes particularly interesting when we look across cultures is that, despite enormous differences in interpretation, certain themes keep appearing. Transformation is one of them. Dreams often seem to become particularly noticeable around periods of transition: adolescence, marriage, parenthood, illness, bereavement, ageing or other moments when life no longer feels quite as stable as it once did. One culture might understand such a dream spiritually and another psychologically, but in both cases dreaming provides a space in which fear, hope and uncertainty can be experienced.
Guidance is another recurring theme. Who or what provides that guidance depends upon the culture. It might come from an ancestor, a deity, a spirit, nature or, in modern psychological language, the unconscious. The explanation changes, but the human need underneath it seems remarkably familiar. When we're uncertain, we look for ways of making sense of our situation. Dreams can give us an opportunity to consider possibilities that our busy waking minds haven't entertained.
Relationships are equally difficult to escape. Across cultures, people dream about parents, partners, children, friends, strangers and those who have died. That shouldn't surprise us. Human beings are profoundly social creatures, and much of our emotional life is constructed through relationships with other people. Whether a deceased relative appearing in a dream is understood as an ancestral visitation, a memory or a psychological representation depends upon the dreamer and their culture. What remains consistent is the importance of the relationship itself.
Nature also appears everywhere in dreams, although the landscape changes. Mountains, rivers, forests, snakes, birds, storms, oceans, stars and the Moon recur in traditions across the world. Yet even apparently universal symbols are shaped by local experience. Someone raised beside the sea has a different relationship with the ocean from somebody who grew up hundreds of miles inland. Agricultural communities, desert peoples and those living in forests inhabit different symbolic landscapes. Dreams don't arise in a cultural vacuum. They borrow their imagery from the worlds in which dreamers actually live.
There are also significant differences in where cultures place the emphasis. In highly individualistic societies, particularly in the contemporary West, we're often encouraged to interpret dreams in terms of our personal identity, emotional development and private psychological life. Cultures that place greater emphasis upon family or community may understand a dream in a more collective way, perhaps considering ancestors, obligations or relationships alongside the individual dreamer. I don't think one approach needs to be declared superior to the other. What interests me is what each tells us about how a society imagines the relationship between the individual and everyone around them.
If travelling taught me anything about dreams, it was the importance of humility. It's remarkably easy to grow up with one explanation of the world and quietly assume that everyone else's beliefs are variations upon our own. Anthropology challenges that assumption. When someone from another culture interprets a dream differently, my first question doesn't have to be whether they're right or wrong. A much more interesting question is why that interpretation makes sense to them. What does it reveal about their understanding of family, religion, nature, death or the self? Once we start asking those questions, dreams become a wonderful doorway into understanding cultures other than our own.
Perhaps this is what continues to fascinate me most. Human cultures are astonishingly diverse, yet every night people everywhere go to sleep and dream. We dream about those we love and those we've lost. We experience fear, desire, confusion, joy and places that exist nowhere outside our sleeping minds. Then we wake up and try to make sense of what happened. Some of us see messages from the Divine or encounters with ancestors. Others see the unconscious at work or the extraordinary activity of a sleeping brain. The explanations may differ profoundly, but the curiosity is shared. After all the travelling I've done and all the conversations I've had about dreams, I find something rather comforting in that. However differently we understand the world, we are all fellow travellers who occasionally wake in the morning wondering, "What on earth was that about?"