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2. Subjectivity and Identity in Dreams
- State University of New York Press
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CHAP TER 2 ———————— 鵽鵾———————— Subjectivity and Identity in Dreams JEANNETTE MARIE MAGEO The ancients recognized all kinds of things in dreams, including, on occasion, messages from the gods—and why not? . . . [W]ho knows, the gods may still speak through dreams. Personally, I don’t mind either way. What concerns us is the tissue that envelops these messages, the network in which, on occasion, something is caught. Perhaps the voice of the gods makes itself heard, but it is a long time since men lent their ears to them. —Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis Being on the edge, as it were, of normative reality, re-presenting it, dreams highlight its anatural character and our “encounter” with this reality. For this reason, the way cultural processes play upon and shape the self is more palpable in dreams than in many other venues. My intent in this chapter is to reflect theoretically on how dreams engage us nightly in what might be called a phenomenological descent into the self. There are hints of a relationship between phenomenology and the dream in that classic Western perspective on dreaming, psychoanalysis. We 23 saw in chapter 1 that for Sigmund Freud, dreams are littered with “day residues.” These are symbols of events from the past day, events that were ambivalently significant to us when they took place. At the time, this significance was swept from conscious mental and emotional life by our need to avoid anxiety-provoking stimuli. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, then, we are always reacting to experience more strongly and with more interest than we know, but in daily life our deeper psychological reactions are clouded.1 The clouds begin to dissipate when we fall asleep. Then the defenses that are usually so vital to psychological well-being (and ill-being) relax, allowing what is normally elided from consciousness to arise. This psychoanalytic portrait of the relation between the waking and sleeping mind implies that in dreams a more immediate level of existence, closer to moment-to-moment experience, is arising too; it also presupposes levels of the self—all colored by enculturation, but some less effectively, more tenuously, than others. In anthropological terms, the clouding elements of daily life are those shared, patterned understandings that compose the normative world and can be inferred from discourse, which anthropologists call cultural schemas (Strauss and Quinn 1997). As Ricoeur (1981, 41–42) says of language, cultural schemas give us access to experience—a certain purchase upon it. But this access occludes and fails to provision other possibilities for experiences in the self and in the world. The anything-but-normal reality of dream life suggests that in sleep cultural schemas sustain a degree of slippage. I am not saying they go away. The chapters to follow will show that, in a sense, cultural schemas become more dramatic. Dreaming, in Shulman and Stroumsa’s words, is “a cultural act” (1999); its landscapes, scenes, figures, objects, problematics , and solutions, as well as ways of recounting the dream, are all appropriated from culture. In Bali, for example, krises are family heirlooms that symbolize secular and spiritual authority (Stephen, chapter 6). Komang dreams of carrying his family’s kris to a temple and pointing it at each family member. In chapter 5 I present a young Samoan who dreams of going to heaven and meeting his great-grandfather, a paramount chief, in the act of signing away American Samoa to the U.S. Navy. In Kracke’s chapter on the Amazonian Parintintins (chapter 8), Manezinho dreams of killing a jaguar. All of these—sacred krises and visiting temples, paramount chiefs and treaties with the United States and hunting jaguars too—are schemas that come from cultures. Ethnographic reports of dreams verify that cultural schemas dictate what people expect to, and do find, in their dream worlds.2 Yet if culture shapes our dreams and our reports about them, it is also true that in dreams the apparently seamless interdigitation of cultural schemas and our experience frays, and our discomfort with these schemas, for most of us submerged in the onrush of daily living, surfaces. Let me give an example from Samoan dreams. 24 Jeannette Marie Mageo [3.233.221.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:35 GMT) I taught at a small college in American Samoa for many years. My Samoan students used to tell me that they knew their parents loved them, but parents never expressed love except when childen were hurt or sick...