Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, colonists, and the seventeenth century by Ann Marie Plane, and: Beyond Land and Sea: The Atlantic coast and the transformation of New England by Christopher L. Pastore (review)

Ann Marie Plane’s Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, colonists, and the seventeenth century and Christopher L. Pastore’s Beyond Land and Sea: The Atlantic coast and the transformation of New England both analyze English attempts to colonize New England in ways that extended beyond political or military hegemony. By examining cross-cultural conversations between Indigenous people and Europeans over dream rituals, and attempts to fix recalcitrant natural boundaries, respectively, they demonstrate the breadth of the colonial project from initial settlement to the mid-nineteenth century. Ann Marie Plane draws upon dream records to highlight the ways that dreams refracted the intense emotions that accompanied the experience of colonization, and argues that awareness of the ways “colonialist expansion encompassed the realm of wonders” (4) can enrich historical inquiry. Plane places a variety of phenomena within the category of dreams and dreamlike states, such as visions, apparitions, waking dreams, and trances, arguing that these experiences existed on a “continuum of mental activity” (11) that reveal the pressures of colonization. Ultimately, she argues that the persistence of Indigenous dream reports represented “a subtle, yet effective, form of resistance to colonialism” (13).

Plane begins by establishing the nature of dream culture in Tudor-Stuart England, particularly among the godly Protestants who formed a significant portion of New England’s newcomer population. The ambivalence with which they regarded dreams crossed the Atlantic with them, especially given the difficulty in discerning a dream’s natural, divine, or diabolic origins. Because educated godly men produced most of the surviving sources it comes as no surprise that the Puritan preoccupation with their spiritual state appeared in their dreams. Although most of these godly dream recorders were hesitant to interpret their dreams as signs of divine approbation, some found comfort in them nonetheless. Despite the limits of evidence pertaining to early seventeenth-century Indigenous dreaming, and its refraction through linguistic and cultural barriers, Plane makes a compelling case that Algonquians in New England valued dreams as a state in which humans could come into contact with the manitou, or spiritual power, imbued in places and beings. Although missionaries depicted Indian powwaws, or shamans, as devil-worshipping antagonists, they recorded accounts of Indigenous beliefs about spiritual realms, deities and individuals with the ability to direct preternatural power in the world. Plane points out that just as the overlap between Algonquian and Puritan conceptions of heaven and hell, and God and the Devil, fostered English certainty that Indians’ rituals were demonic, analogous Algonquian and English views of dreams also reinforced mutual misunderstandings.

The sources make it difficult to extend this analysis to colonists who were not educated men but they do allow Plane to reflect productively on the ways that containing and moderating the occasionally intense emotions of dreams related to the obligations of manhood. Michael Wigglesworth, Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, and Quaker convert Peter Easton are ideal candidates for Plane’s analysis, which merges historical methods with a thoughtful application of some aspects of Freudian analysis. Like John Demos’s insightful use of psychoanalytic methods in his analysis of witchcraft and possession,¹ Plane allows psychoanalysis to expand her interpretations of dreams without allowing that lens overly to distort the historical context in which they emerged. Plane also locates an important role for dreams and portents after King Philip’s War (1675–76) pitted allied Indigenous forces drawn from the Wampanoag and Narragansett, for example, against the English and their own Indigenous allies. Reports of Indigenous dreams and visions became another way for Increase Mather and others who recorded the war to stake claims for English innocence, Indian savagery and the providential meaning of a conflict...