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| 31 2 Indian and English Dreams Colonial Hierarchy and Manly Restraint in Seventeenth-Century New England Ann Marie Plane In the last months of his life, Samuel Sewall—a prominent merchant and chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature—had a dream so remarkable that he recorded it in his diary in great detail: Last night I dreamed that a little boy had got away with my watch. I found him on the Common, and by giving him another Watch, persuaded him to give me that round which was engraven Auris, mens, oculus, manus, os, pes; munere fungi Dum pergunt, praestat discere velle mori. When I awaked I was much startled at it. The Lord help me to watch and pray that I may not enter into Temptation.1 Sewall had his dream in 1728, when he was already an elderly man, recently retired from his post on the bench; he would die a little over a year later.2 Sewall the diarist would never fully unravel the pun that Sewall the dreamer had constructed in the night. The little boy had stolen the old man’s “watch”— given form in the dream as a timepiece “engraven” with some cautionary lines in Latin. Of course, the little thief also carried away a second type of “watch”—whose meaning, as watchfulness or inner vigilance, is contained in Sewall’s comments immediately following his dream report: “The Lord help me to watch and pray that I may not enter into Temptation.” The type of punning in this dream is an example of a phenomenon that Freud noted more than a century ago—that dreams often code abstract concepts through concrete imagery, so that a vigilant “watch” becomes, literally, a timepiece.3 It is possible that, at the least, the dream speaks of the aging Sewall’s anxieties about death, as foreshadowed by recent events in his life—his retirement from the Massachusetts Superior Court and his bouts with ill health. Indeed, in the last lines of the previous entry, made about a month before, Sewall 32 | Ann Marie Plane noted, “[I] Pray that the Retirement and Leisure I am seeking for may be successfully improved in preparing for a better world [i.e., heaven].”4 Certainly the Latin lines on the watch in the dream speak about the struggle against death and decay; they read: “While ear, mind, eye, hand, bone, foot continue to perform their functions, it is better to want to learn than to stagnate [fade, die].”5 The central image itself—a mischievous boy, willfully taunting his elder—represents both Sewall’s attempts to control unruly parts of himself, as well as, more directly, his struggle to maintain dominance over inferiors (the mischievous boys) in his own society. This chapter argues that dreams and dream reporting served a variety of purposes for men in colonial New England. For Anglo-American men, dreams offered a challenge: unruly and ungovernable, dreams presented a nightly feast of unrestrained impulses, temptations, and delusions that had to be mastered, contained, and redirected in waking life. This mastery and containment mirrored the sort of containment of social disorder that was required of male patriarchs in early modern Anglo-American society —especially that of nonconformists or “Puritans.” Dreams were mostly dismissed as inconsequential, and therefore it is hard to find records of them. The records we do have come mainly from diaries, which were, of course, kept mainly by men of higher status or those who had official duties that required they keep a personal record. Thus, the recorded dreams of Anglo-American colonists are almost always those of men (there are no existing seventeenth-century New England diaries kept by women); and while the diary genre by its nature privileges private reflection, the recorded dreams we have show a concern with restrained self-scrutiny that cannot be explained by the nature of the records alone. Dream reports offered the diarist an opportunity to display his caution, discipline, and disinterest—all of them important parts of the proper performance of masculine identity among New England patriarchs. Another set of dream beliefs, however, also pervaded seventeenth-century New England. For the Algonquian-speaking Native peoples of southern New England, the careful attention to dreams was a closely held spiritual value. Dreams were assumed to be significant; both their study and their central role in shamanic rituals required a public and enthusiastic embrace of dreams and dream reporting. In the colonial context, records of Indians’ practices...

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