Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (review)

John Locke hated dreams. He thought they were "extravagant and incoherent," and "little conformable to the perfection and order of a rational being" (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. D. Woozley [Glasgow: Collins, 1980], 95). Too often, we have taken his attitude to express American Enlightenment views more generally, neglecting dreams in our study of the period for the very reason that we assume they were neglected by those we study. Recently, however, cultural historians have found new importance in dreams' nonconformity. Mechal Sobel's Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era joins works such as Leigh Eric Schmidt's Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment and Ronald Hoffman, Fredrika J. Teute, and Sobel's Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America to confirm what Locke's scorn itself suggests, if read as an attempt to shame readers away from potentially threatening areas of investigation—namely, that dreams, trances, visions, and other forms of what he called "private thinking (so private, that the man himself perceives it not)" (96) informed self-fashioning in important if subversive ways throughout what Sobel, in keeping with the study's resolute anti-elitism, calls "the greater Revolutionary period" (3).

Dreams can seem an insult to history: were there any mental activity that defied incorporation into meaningful social pattern, it would be the dream. But of course, there isn't, and Sobel does a wonderful job of melding psychoanalytic theory, ethnographies of Native American, African- and European-American dream practice, analysis of Nazi Germany dream reports, and new historicist literary study in order to establish that dreams are in fact "cultural productions" (35). In addition to opening new vistas on the self, she engages an astonishingly wide variety of selves. Sobel focuses on the "poor and disadvantaged," who, she argues, began a twin process during this period of inventing the self in the sense we now understand it and of writing journals and autobiographies, at the inception of church and then state, for the purpose of recording and shaping this newly discovered entity. According to Sobel, dreams formed a common and central element in more than half the two hundred autobiographies she studied. Taken together, she argues, they record "the change from a permeable or collective sense of self to a far more individual and interior one, a change that was accompanied by the revision of the understanding of life from a random string of events to a dramatic pattern" (18). In other words, life becomes a narrative (with the self as narrator) as it begins to be narrated—and dreams are the touchstone of this transformation.

Why, in a study of personal narrative and self-formation, should dreams occupy the central frame? How exactly did they inform self-fashioning, and how did this process change over the course of one hundred years? Simply put, dreams were where many subjects targeted what Stephen Greenblatt called their "alien other," a figure who needed to be attacked and destroyed in order for new identity to develop (often through complex processes of projection and "introjection," where "hated attributes of the other became cherished attributes of the self " [5]). In America, Sobel argues, class receded from the central role it had played in Europe, and gender and race became the primary categories from which oppositional figures were drawn. Thus, the study is structured around four chapters, each configuring one such opposition: whites rejecting "alien" blacks, blacks rejecting "enemy" whites, men defining themselves in opposition to women, and women defining themselves in opposition to men. It was not enough to fashion oneself against some perceived other, however; one also (again in line with Greenblatt) needed to commit to an "outside authority" in order to "legitimate the change in self ": generally a sect, church, movement, or state (14). It was often in dreams that subjects first submitted to these authorities, and awoke determined to carry out this...