Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century by Ann Marie Plane (review)

Like Ann Marie Plane’s 2000 Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Colonial New England, her 2014 Dreams and the Invisible World offers readers a glimpse into the interior lives of early Americans. The many dream accounts Plane includes provide some of the most fascinating and emotionally provocative source material readers of seventeenth-century texts are likely to encounter, while contributing to history-of-the-emotions scholarship, overturning teleological disenchantment narratives, and engaging recent scholarly attention to Native American resistance and persistence. Plane reads dreams across a wide array of colonial experience, but the core of the book attends to how two disparate dream philosophies meet in colonization. The English colonists and the Native Americans discussed, appropriated, dismissed, and even found guidance in the other’s dreams, and through these intersections, Plane shows how colonialism influenced each group’s view and experience of the invisible world.

One particular dream crystallizes many of Plane’s major concerns: in his 1727 Indian Biographies, Experience Mayhew recorded the dream of a converted Wampanoag woman from Martha’s Vineyard. In the dream, the unnamed woman heard “a Voice … in her own Language” comforting her during the illness of her sister, Abigail Kesoehtaut (qtd. on 154). The woman reported the dream to Mayhew, asking for interpretive guidance, but Mayhew’s account turns the question to his readers. The “Query” at the end of his narrative asks “whether the Person that dreamed the dream now related, ought to take any other notice of it, than she should of any common Dream; or what she should think concerning it” (qtd. on 155). At the heart of Mayhew’s question is Plane’s central subject: how did seventeenth-century colonists and natives view, report, interpret, and act on dreams, and how much stock should we, as modern readers, put in those dreams?

The book’s strength is the way it brings two interpretive contexts to bear on one another, and the dream Mayhew recorded demonstrates this most saliently. The readings Plane herself offers of the dream from Indian Biographies mix and merge colonial and native interpretive practices. First, Plane reads the dream within a Calvinist context, describing the cycle of anxiety and assurance the dreamer experiences concerning her sister’s soul. Plane then offers an interpretation within an Algonquian framework, arguing that the dreamer’s act of publicly relating the dream reflects a widespread practice among New England natives to share dreams and seek interpretive aid. Finally, Plane reads the dream report as an artifact of cultural contact. Noting how even Mayhew’s intervention failed to fully “colonize” the Wampanoag woman’s dream, as the Voice in the dream spoke in her native language, Plane argues that “dream reports like this one enabled Wampanoags to explore … an assertion of Native presence and Native self-worth despite Christian teachings and English dominance” (160). Complimenting work such as that done by Kristina Bross, David Silverman, and Kathleen Bragdon (on whom Plane relies extensively) to demonstrate native resistance, Plane’s book maps those narratives onto the invisible world by examining the dream and systems of dream belief in seventeenth-century New England.

One of the first monographs to treat early American dreams, Dreams and the Invisible World truly does read these recorded dreams within their colonial context, extending sustained and equal attention to colonist and native alike. The first two chapters act as historical foundation for the analysis and argument of the following chapters as they describe what Plane calls the “systems of dream belief” in colonial New England. Amid the historical scaffolding that most scholars of the period will be familiar with, the reader will find clear descriptions of native and colonial dream practice. Plane first establishes the history of early modern English “ambivalence” toward dreams. Drawing largely from John Winthrop’s diary, Plane demonstrates how the systems of dream belief established by earlier English...