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People in Western culture assume that we can know and experience events only after they have begun to take place in a physical world accessible to our senses. The Dunne-za assume that events can take place only after people have known and experienced them in myths, dreams, and visions…. How a person knows something defines his or her humanity more than what he or she knows.
As members of Western society, we are living at a time when our own conceptions about reality have undergone tremendous changes, resulting in a polarization between two complementary paradigms of institution and impulse…. Within the institutional paradigm true reality is revealed only when we are in total control of our faculties, while within the impulsive paradigm reality is revealed during dreaming and other alternative forms of consciousness. As a result it is rather difficult for an ethnographer to decide what individuals from radically different cultures mean by reality.
Although dreams are universal among human beings, cultures vary widely in judging their significance and meaning. In this preliminary essay, I will distinguish and contrast three major cultural orientations, which I term: (a) communal attunement: dream sharing (and vision seeking), (b) individual guidance: the dream as a personal message, and (c) the dream as mental noise (electrical static) to be disregarded or misinterpreted.
There is something to be learned about dreams from cultures that take dreams seriously. People in such cultures have spent their lives
* Professor emeritus, Washington University at St. Louis; Lecturer, St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute.
Page 417giving considerable attention to dreams, and the theories they have developed about them often contain some of the fruits of their lifetimes of observations.