The Zuni Indians of New Mexico have a custom of making public their "bad" dreams ("good" dreams, however, are sometimes withheld even from close relatives). Among the Quiche of Guatemala, all dreams, even small fragments, are shared immediately with family and tribe. An Australian aborigine told me, "We tell our dreams to the group because different people have different gifts and might help understand it. We have a saying, 'Share it out before the next sunrise.'" It sounded to me like the informal dream-sharing groups that have sprung up in Western societies over the past several decades--until, that is, he added a comment I found particularly intriguing: "We often meet each other while we're sleeping."
One society which reportedly followed a dream-sharing regimen was the Temiar Senoi, a jungle tribe of 10,000 living in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Researcher Kilton Stewart reported in 1954 that if, for example, a child dreamed he had been attacked by a friend, his father would advise him to tell his friend about it. Then the friend would be advised by his father to give the dreamer a present and go out of his way to be friendly to him, in case he had offended the dreamer without wishing to.
"Thus," said Stewart, "the aggression building up around the image of the friend in the dreamer's mind thereby became the basis of a friendly exchange." Later in the day, dreams would be discussed by the entire community, and the messages and insights they contained would become part of the ritual and behavior of waking life.
Whether Stewart's Rousseauian portrait can be taken at face value or was a confabulation, remains an open question. Yet decades of research have revealed that tribal cultures the world over give dreams a central role in their collective lives. Barbara Tedlock reports that dreams are of such integral importance to Mexico's Quiche Maya that one out of four are initiated as "daykeepers," their term for dream interpreters. And the tales of the Temiar Senoi, whether apocryphal or historical, have been an inspiration to those seek Aborigines claim to meet each other during sleeping to bring dreams into the realm of social discourse.
One such person is the Unitarian minister Jeremy Taylor, who began running dream groups while performing civilian alternative service during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. He was assigned to do community organizing in Emeryville, California, an "all-black, working- and underclass" community. Tensions between blacks and whites in the group ran high, and meetings often degenerated into name-calling sessions.
One day Taylor suggested that they stop talking about waking life and instead start sharing their dreams. Many confessed they were having "nasty, racist dreams...of being attacked and menaced by sinister, hostile and dangerous people of other races." Though he feared such dreams could be like pouring gasoline on the fire, soon a more open form of dialogue began to emerge. It became clear to everyone, he says, that the "nasty" dream characters were unintegrated, undeveloped aspects of their own personalities, denied and projected onto others. They realized, writes Taylor, that "these ugly, scary, dark, powerful, sexy, violent, irresponsible, dangerous dream figures are vitally alive parts of my own authentic being." Gradually, he reports, "repressions were released, projections withdrawn. ..."
He notes that cynicism, too, started to evaporate: "Authentic personal likes and dislikes began to replace ritual 'politeness,' blundering patronizing comments and repressed fear," Taylor writes. "The energy that had previously been squandered counterproductively in maintaining the repression and projection suddenly came welling up...as spontaneous surges of vitality and welt-being...creative possibility and enthusiasm." The group dreamwork contributed to a style of interracial, grassroots political organizing which eventually helped elect the first black public officials in what had been called "the most corrupt community in California."
The dreamer may be dismayed to find himself face to face with, even in thrall to, denizens of circles and rungs of society he in waking life tries to avoid. Dreams are the great leveler. But it is hard to avoid the fact--indeed, it is a little mortifying-that these images come close to cartoonish stereotypes. Even for those of us who pride ourselves on having a social conscience, our prejudices against the "other" have deep psychic roots. Such broad-stroke dream images function as emblems for what is ignored, repressed and denied--not just in my psyche, but in society at large.
Such images serve to undermine the ego's view of status and social position, its preposterous belief that we're not all in this together, that some of us are "above" others, that we can really wall ourselves off from our neighbors. The psyche has no such gated communities.
Though most of us are only too glad to see the upside-down world of the dream dissipate in the morning sun, these images are a potential source of social healing, telling us we cannot remain comfortably distanced from others' suffering. In our prejudices, fears and abdications of human connection, it is ourselves we are rejecting--the tender, wounded parts that contain our greatest wealth of soul.
Marc Ian Barasch
Reprinted from Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life by Marc Ian Barasch (Riverhead Books, Penguin Putnam Inc.). Copyright October 2000.
PHOTO (COLOR): Aborigines claim to meet each other during sleep.
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