Dreams, Dreamers and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World ed. by Anne Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle (review)

Shall these texts live? This is a major challenge for the historian of dreams in other eras. A dream is not a text; it is an experience whose full nature and dimensions can only be glimpsed even in an extensive dream report. If we are working with contemporary dreamers, we may have the opportunity to enter that fuller experience with them, through careful questioning to elicit details that are initially flown, and even by traveling with them back inside the dreamspace, through the techniques I call “dream reentry” and “tracking.”¹⁹ However, this option is not obviously available when we are trying to fathom the dreams in the personal diary of an eighteenth-century Quaker physician or the dreams attributed to an anonymous Huron/Wendat by a seventeenth-century French Jesuit.

When we are examining reports of dreams collected by outsiders—such as missionaries or anthropologists—with very different agendas from native dreamers, the challenge of remoteness in time is magnified, because now we are seeing through a distorting lens. Close study of the context of dreams, and especially of the way they are shared and valued in a certain time and culture, brings us closer. A history of dreams must be, to no small degree, a history of dream sharing, and this is what the authors of Dreams, Dreamers and Visions have given us, in a remarkable collection of essays that explore and compare patterns of dreaming on both sides of the Atlantic in the early modern era.

The editors set the stage beautifully in their introduction, announcing that “dreams and the struggle to explain them offer a unique vantage point from which to examine the social construction of truth and meaning in an historical period often considered the crucible of the modern world” (p. 2). In societies that value dreams and visions, the sharing of a dream may be the assertion of authority and a claim to divine favor. When dreams are regarded as prophetic or direct messages from divine powers, a dream can be a mandate for revolt or reformation. In history, dream sharing has been “a means through which to assert oneself in the social world” and “a power-laded form of communication” (p. 8). In societies where dreams are valued and regarded as possible messages from the divine, some kind of dream police often arise. If dreams are known to be powerful, there will always be those who want to hijack that power. So we see church authorities ruling on whether a dream comes from angels or devils or is mere trash to be thrown out.

In many languages, you do not say that you “had” a dream; you say that you “saw” a dream. In a fascinating discussion of the valuation of inner sight, Mary Baine Campbell reminds us that rêve the French word for “dream” that supplanted songe in this period, arises from verbs that mean “roving” (or “raving”). Its first appearance in print may have been in Le Jeune’s account of Iroquoian dream practices in the Jesuit Relations, the huge compilation of blackrobe reports from New France in the seventeenth century (p. 47).

Janine Rivière’s elegant contribution on night terrors will win the sympathy of contemporary sufferers from the misnamed phenomenon of sleep paralysis (it is parasomniac, “around sleep,” not of sleep) though early modern explanations (from demonic invasions to the effects of lying on your back) are unlikely to be found helpful.

In her careful account of Lucrecia de León, the dream seer of Madrid in the age of the Spanish Armada, Maria V. Jordán takes us into a culture in which dreams were scanned for political and military intelligence as well as applauded or condemned as vehicles for prophecy, depending on the implications for those in authority. I would have liked to have seen more on Lucrecia’s relations with her amanuenses and...