Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World

By Ann Marie Plane, Leslie Tuttle and Anthony F. C. Wallace

In Europe and North and South America during the early modern period, people believed that their dreams might be, variously, messages from God, the machinations of demons, visits from the dead, or visions of the future. Interpreting their dreams in much the same ways as their ancient and medieval forebears had done—and often using the dream-guides their predecessors had written—dreamers rejoiced in heralds of good fortune and consulted physicians, clerics, or practitioners of magic when their visions waxed ominous. Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions traces the role of dreams and related visionary experiences in the cultures within the Atlantic world from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, examining an era of cultural encounters and transitions through this unique lens.

In the wake of Reformation-era battles over religious authority and colonial expansion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas, questions about truth and knowledge became particularly urgent and debate over the meaning and reliability of dreams became all the more relevant. Exploring both indigenous and European methods of understanding dream phenomena, this volume argues that visions were central to struggles over spiritual and political authority. Featuring eleven original essays, Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions explores the ways in which reports and interpretations of dreams played a significant role in reflecting cultural shifts and structuring historic change.

Contributors: Emma Anderson, Mary Baine Campbell, Luis Corteguera, Matthew Dennis, Carla Gerona, María V Jordán, Luís Filipe Silvério Lima, Phyllis Mack, Ann Marie Plane, Andrew Redden, Janine Rivière, Leslie Tuttle, Anthony F. C. Wallace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812208047

Book preview

Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions

Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions

The Early Modern Atlantic World

Edited by

ANN MARIE PLANE

and

LESLIE TUTTLE

Foreword by Anthony F. C. Wallace

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dreams, dreamers, and visions : the early modern Atlantic world / edited by

Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4504-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Dreams—North Atlantic Region—History—16th century. 2. Dreams—North Atlantic Region—History—17th century. 3. Dreams—North Atlantic Region—History—18th century. 4. Dream interpretation—North Atlantic Region—History—16th century. 5. Dream interpretation—North Atlantic Region—History—17th century. 6. Dream interpretation—North Atlantic Region—History—18th century. 7. Visions—North Atlantic Region—History—16th century. 8. Visions—North Atlantic Region—History—17th century. 9. Visions—North Atlantic Region—History—18th century. 10. North Atlantic Region—Civilization—History—16th century. 11. North Atlantic Region—Civilization—History—17th century. 12. North Atlantic Region—Civilization—History—18th century. I. Plane, Ann Marie. II. Tuttle, Leslie.

BF1078.D737      2013

154.6′309—dc23

2012050165

Contents

Foreword. Xanadu: Dreams of the Dark Side of Paradise

ANTHONY F. C. WALLACE

Introduction: The Literatures of Dreaming

ANN MARIE PLANE AND LESLIE TUTTLE

Part I. European Theories, Politics, and Experiences of Dreaming

Chapter 1. The Inner Eye: Early Modern Dreaming and Disembodied Sight

MARY BAINE CAMPBELL

Chapter 2. Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the Nightmare in Premodern England

JANINE RIVIÈRE

Chapter 3. Competition and Confirmation in the Iberian Prophetic Community: The 1589 Invasion of Portugal in the Dreams of Lucrecia de Leόn

MARÍA V. JORDÁN

Chapter 4. The Peasant Who Went to Hell: Dreams and Visions in Early Modern Spain

LUÍS R. CORTEGUERA

Chapter 5. Dreams and Prophecies: The Fifth Empire of Father Antonio Vieira and Messianic Visions of the Bragança Dynasty in Seventeenth-Century Portugal and Brazil

LUÍS FILIPE SILVÉRIO LIMA

(TRANSLATED BY ANNA LUISA GESELBRACHT)

Part II. Intercultural Encounter

Chapter 6. Flying Like an Eagle: Franciscan and Caddo Dreams and Visions

CARLA GERONA

Chapter 7. Dream-Visions and Divine Truth in Early Modern Hispanic America

ANDREW REDDEN

Chapter 8. French Jesuits and Indian Dreams in Seventeenth-Century New France

LESLIE TUTTLE

Chapter 9. My Spirit Found a Unity with This Holy Man: A Nun’s Visions and the Negotiation of Pain and Power in Seventeenth-Century New France

EMMA ANDERSON

Part III. The Eighteenth Century: Prophecy and Revival

Chapter 10. The Unbounded Self: Dreaming and Identity in the British Enlightenment

PHYLLIS MACK

Chapter 11. Visions of Handsome Lake: Seneca Dreams, Prophecy, and the Second Great Awakening

MATTHEW DENNIS

Notes

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Xanadu: Dreams of

the Dark Side of Paradise

ANTHONY F. C. WALLACE

Some years ago, when I was a freshman at Lebanon Valley College, I took the required introductory course in English literature. The professor, who happened to be my father, required the class to memorize what he called neck verses, brief passages from important writers, that hopefully would help us to remember some of the common literary heritage, and also would serve as badges of identity, rather like military dog tags, identifying us as members of the educated (i.e., English-educated) community. Some lines from S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan have stayed with me:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Inspired by her symphony and song, he would build that pleasure dome, but would terrify those who saw him, a demon with

… flashing eyes, [and] floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Kubla Khan, one of the gems of English literature, belongs in a volume exploring the importance of dreaming in the early modern Atlantic world. The verses were composed in a dream. According to his own account, after taking an anodyne (he was addicted to laudanum), Coleridge awoke remembering a poem he had composed in his sleep. He began to write it down but was interrupted by a visitor, and by the time he returned to his desk, he had forgotten the rest of the two hundred or so remaining lines. The classic study of the sources of the language and images in Coleridge’s poem is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, by John Livingston Lowes, a collation of the writings, mostly travel literature, from memories of which Coleridge had selected the elements of composition. Lowes’s 650-page mountain of literary criticism itself has been repeatedly reprinted, as recently as 2008.

As Lowes properly points out, the magical synthesis was joiner’s work. Coleridge’s dream was evidently the product of work, the putting together of items from a jumble of disparate elements into a construction that satisfied him as a writer. Anecdotal accounts of intellectual and scientific discoveries made in dreams also point to the dream as real mental work trying to solve a problem preoccupying the dreamer. And the essays in this anthology reveal dreamwork as the source of religious and social innovation. I would speculate generally that the dream is mental work in which the brain sifts through mountains of mnemonic debris, searching for the solution to a pressing personal or professional problem that has proved to be insoluble by conscious effort. Some dreams remain garbage, but a few constructions have promise, and if they deal meaningfully with issues important to the dreamer and to a larger community, they are taken seriously (whether or not they are acceptable). Seen in this perspective, the dream is a random search for an alternative survival strategy when standard plans have failed and thus can be seen as an adaptive evolutionary device, biologically wired into the brain, like the capacity for mutation in the genome. But Lowes avoids giving psychoanalytic or other interpretations of the meaning and function of the dreams that he examines. We shall approach those issues later when we return to Coleridge and his world.

To give a personal example of a dream as an effort to solve real problems, I will cite the dream told me by a friend, an American Indian herbalist (medicine man), who was widely respected by both White and Indian clients. In his youth he had a dream in which a woman dressed in white stood before him, holding a basket, covered with a white cloth. She said the basket contained a plant that would provide a sure cure for tuberculosis. But she only showed him the roots; the leaves remained concealed. When he and I were out driving he would now and then say stop! and jump out of the car, to run into a field to uproot a plant. But it never was the right one.

The chapters in this volume reveal in fine historical detail the importance of dreams on both sides of the Atlantic, among both Europeans and Native Americans, and also explore the ways in which local culture and social and cultural differences affected the response to these dreams. It is a large task, made difficult by the scholar having to plunge into a turbulent semantic ocean. The word dream is difficult to confine to the nighttime sleeping experience; our writers include waking visionary states and religious experiences; and it is impossible to exclude daydreams and even literary fantasies whose content resembles, and overlaps with, dreams in sleep. And the word has come into secular usage to refer to conscious plans, ambitions, hopes, and utopian political principles, as in the phrase The American Dream (of material success), or in Martin Luther King’s iconic words, I have a dream …

In most of the indigenous Native American societies considered here, as several of the authors emphasize, the traditional theory of the source of dreams is spiritual communication. The dreamer lives in a world that includes all the elements of Creation in a great Cycle of Being. Consciousness, memory, emotion, and spiritual power are not confined to humans but are shared by other animate and inanimate entities. These beings are not divinities but fellow creatures who can communicate with humans in various ways including dreams that foretell the future, diagnose and lend power to treat disease, locate lost objects, give advice on human relations and behavior, and establish ties between spiritual entities who may serve as guardian spirits, or medicines, or, if properly treated, as food; even the human soul itself can express its unconscious wishes in dreams. Some persons—and species—have a special gift for sending and receiving these spiritual communications.

In the European, Christian societies who made contact with the New World, dreaming was less a conversation between humans and a surrounding universe of sentient companions than the intrusion of information, guidance, and prophecy from a pantheon of supernatural beings. Only humans had souls. God and his saints and angels, on the one side, and the devil and his legions of demons on the other, sought to save these souls for heaven, or seduce them toward hell. Different nations and denominations saw each other as human agents of these two spiritual armies. Christianity sought to impose the immutable rule of God’s law; Lucifer demanded allegiance to his own hellish order. Dreams were weapons on this cosmic battlefield.

The unpredictable, novel solutions to human problems provided by dreams on both sides of the Atlantic were, as our authors have painstakingly revealed, subject to different sorts of regulation. Perhaps regulation is too strong a word for the Native American approach. On some occasions dreams were ritualized, the dreamer given a program, as it were, of what to expect, as in the guardian spirit quest where the youthful aspirant fasted, in isolation, in uncomfortable places, in anticipation that his spiritual guide would recognize the sincerity of the youth and reveal himself. Among the Iroquois, obscure dream wishes were most spectacularly revealed in the Feast of Fools in the annual Midwinter Ceremony, to be diagnosed and satisfied. Medicine societies were founded by dreamers who were told the way to cure disease. And the authority of the dreams of prophets like Handsome Lake was widely recognized.

In Europe, on the other hand, dreams—especially prophetic dreams—were subject to the scrutiny of authorities both lay and ecclesiastical. The Inquisition subjected dreamers to interrogation and sometimes torture in order to ascertain the orthodoxy of the message and its source in heaven or hell. The records of the Inquisition provide valuable information on the commerce in hallucinogens, particularly the black market in ointments containing atropine, whose consumers were preprogrammed to experience aerial transport to ceremonies at witches’ covens. Possession by evil spirits was (and still is) countered by the ritual of exorcism (unlike the acceptance of ritual possession in indigenous African religions). The induction of visions by the use of psychotropic drugs in our own day has given rise to—or rather, continued—the business in drugs of all kinds, from the amanita mushrooms of northern Eurasia, the hashish (cannabis) or marijuana of the Near East, the drinking of ether in English slums, on to derivatives of the coca leaf and poppy. It might be worth noting that Sigmund Freud began his exploration of the psychodynamics of dreaming while he was investigating the properties of cocaine. Alcohol might as well be included here; one recalls William Hogarth’s Gin Lane. It has been suggested that the original addiction of Native Americans to European whiskeys was prompted by alcohol’s supposed potential for inducing dreamlike states of dissociation. Seizure of the New World may have been significantly aided by the sale of commercially produced alcoholic products to Native Americans who paid for these products by the sale of land and choosing sides in European wars. A similar charge has been laid against British imperial interest in opening the Chinese market to opium from India and forcing land and political concessions in the process.

The other tradition that our authors rightly emphasize, however, is the gradual development of schools of thought that recognized dreams not as communications or intrusions by outside spiritual entities but as products from within. Freud, who has inspired a vast—but diminishing—scholarly and popular following, falls outside the time period of this volume. But as the authors point out, recognition of dreams as voices from within was not uncommon before Freud. One of Coleridge’s associates, Joseph Priestley, in 1802 published an article in an American medical journal arguing that dreams were indeed the residue of memories unconscious in the waking state, physically recorded in the brain, which he suggested forgot nothing. And the similar Iroquois concept of dreams as the wishes of the soul of the dreamer himself, anticipating the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, does belong to the Atlantic world, and descriptions were of course transmitted to Jesuit and other Catholic seminaries in Europe. The recognition of the process of self-revelation in drug-induced dreams—in vino veritas—is an old forerunner of the experimentation with the use of LSD and other now-proscribed drugs as a means of opening the gates to the inner world. When medical experimentation with such drugs was still legal in the 1950s, when I was employed as an anthropologist in the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, LSD, mescaline, and atropine were being rather casually administered as research aids in the production of temporary model psychoses. A complementary anthology on the business of making and selling oneiric drugs might properly follow this excellent collection of essays on the social and cultural context of dreaming.

But let me return to Coleridge and Kubla Khan. Coleridge and his friends provide a fascinating case study of the theme of this anthology, the role of dreams in the formation of the new Atlantic world. Coleridge belonged to a community of romantic poets in early nineteenth-century England who looked forward to an egalitarian and peaceful world guided by reason, science, and personal spiritual conscience, rather than by old establishments of political and religious orthodoxy. Their names are familiar: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake. Shelley’s wife Mary Shelley, famous for her novel Frankenstein, was the daughter of the radical social reformers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and after Shelley’s death a friend of utopian socialist Robert Owen. But the intellectual leader whom they all seem to have admired was Joseph Priestley, the celebrated dissenting clergyman and a founder of the Unitarian Church, an experimental chemist who discovered oxygen and other gaseous components of air. Priestley was a supporter of the American and French Revolutions. His admirers in America included Franklin’s American Philosophical Society and members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), whose founder, George Fox, one may recall, had been inspired by a vision of blood running in the streets of bloody Litchfield. Among Priestley’s chemical discoveries was nitrous oxide (N2O), laughing gas, which before being widely adopted as a dental anesthetic was used by many, including Coleridge and Southey, as a hallucinogen. Priestley’s own comments on laughing gas and dreams were published in the first American medical journal, the New York Medical Repository. The power of nitrous oxide in inducing spiritual enlightenment was later celebrated by the American psychologist William James in fulsome language: With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.

But on a larger stage, the pantisocratic movement was enduring the failure of European society to live up to romantic expectations. In Xanadu, Coleridge heard ancestral voices prophesying war. Dreams of a new heaven on earth, inspired by the progress of science, the philosophies of the Enlightenment, and the democratic revolutions in America and France, were followed by the Terror in France. Xanadu had been a dream of progress dying on the dark side of paradise.

In 1791, Priestley’s sympathy for the revolution in France led to the burning of his house and laboratory in Birmingham and his flight to the United States, where his sons had already bought three hundred thousand acres of land in northern Pennsylvania. Rather than remain in Philadelphia, the political and intellectual center of the new nation, Priestley chose instead to move to a frontier settlement, Northumberland, on the north branch of the Susquehanna River, directly above the forks and across from the site of the former Indian town of Shamokin, which had been the gateway for the Tuscaroras and other Indian refugees fleeing north from southern wars to shelter in Iroquois territory. After the Indian wars began, from 1763 through the American Revolution, Shamokin had been the site of Fort Augusta, a massive fortification whose walls and towers were perhaps a quarter of a mile square. There, across from Shamokin, Priestley built what has been called a stately mansion (still standing) that on its completion would be the nucleus of a utopian socialist community. Coleridge and Southey planned to follow Priestley with ten other couples to found a pantisocratic colony, but their plan fell apart, a victim of financial insufficiency and disagreements between Coleridge and Southey on philosophical and family tensions (they had married two sisters).

Whether or not a description of the plans for Priestley’s mansion had reached Coleridge by 1794, when construction began, or later, the poem Kubla Khan, written in 1797, would seem on its surface to be a dreamwork seeking to resolve issues relating to the pilgrimage to America to join Priestley. The imagery has an uncanny resemblance to Priestley’s actual estate. The great Kubla Khan is of course the great Priestley, the sacred river Alph is the Susquehanna, the pleasure dome (dome in the archaic usage) is the mansion, the walls and towers suggest Fort Augusta, and the twice five miles of fertile ground is just about enough to suit a commune of pantisocrats. With respect to the river that plunges into caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea, it is perhaps too much of a stretch of divination to point out that a few years later (well, actually as I recall in the 1950s) the north branch of the Susquehanna River broke through the river bed into the hundreds of miles of subterranean gangways, hundreds of feet deep, in the anthracite coal region west of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. But on another level, the imagery of an ejaculating river and its waters descending through a dark romantic chasm would seem to be sexual and personal to Coleridge, and the fearsome drug fiend relates to Coleridge’s use of opium. The structure of the poem displays together a scene of peaceful heaven followed by the dark side of war (Coleridge had fought briefly in the war against France in 1793), and he was haunted by a depressive conviction (perhaps exacerbated by a veteran’s post-traumatic stress disorder) of humanity’s incorrigible original sin. Amid the tumult of the sacred river’s fall into the lifeless ocean, Kubla heard ancestral voices prophesying war.

But there is another dream story that may provide a more nitty-gritty illustration of the mutual, but ambivalent, accommodation of transatlantic Indian and English dreamers. In the colonial era, an Iroquois vice–roy was deputized by the Grand Council of the Confederacy to supervise Indian refugees seeking to settle along the north branch of the Susquehanna. He was an Oneida named Shikellamy. His white counterpart was the Pennsylvania interpreter Conrad Weiser. They became friends and a frontier legend links them in a story about their dreams. Its meaningfulness at the time, apocryphal or not, is attested by the fact that the same story links other notable pairs, including the Crown’s Indian agent, Sir William Johnson. In any case, it was native etiquette not to ask a friend directly for a gift, but the wish could be expressed in a dream. Conrad, said Shikellamy, I dreamed that you gave me a new rifle. So the rifle was forthcoming. Later Weiser said, Friend Shikellamy, I dreamed that you gave me an island in the Susquehanna River. (Possibly the large island between Priestley’s future mansion and Shamokin.) And so Weiser acquired some Indian land. Then Shikellamy said, Brother Conrad, let us never dream together again. A few years ago, the same story was told to me, adjusted to twenty-first-century circumstances, but with the same punch line.

Years later, one of Shikellamy’s sons from Shamokin, Logan, launched a bitter frontier war in Ohio (Lord Dunmore’s War), in which he sought to avenge his kin murdered by the infamous Paxton Boys and White thugs. Later he became famous as the author of Logan’s Lament, celebrated by another of Priestley’s friends, Thomas Jefferson, as an example of Indian eloquence. He refused to sign the peace with the whites, but added sadly, I had even thought [dreamed?] to have lived with you.

Today there is a bronze statue of Shikellamy standing on the land of Weiser’s homestead in Berks County, a historic site maintained by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Shikellamy is carrying a peace pipe, not a gun. And there are no Indian reservations in Pennsylvania. But there is a little park at Shamokin, dedicated to the memory of Shikellamy, and across the river stands Priestley’s mansion. A part of Xanadu remains.

Introduction

The Literatures of Dreaming

ANN MARIE PLANE AND LESLIE TUTTLE

Could it be that the rationalism of Western modernity was inspired by a dream? In 1619, a twenty-three-year-old soldier named René Descartes separated himself from society to undertake a kind of personal philosophical retreat. More than fifteen years would pass before Descartes published the Discourse on Method, a seminal work of modern philosophy proposing that truth can only be attained through the disciplined application of doubt and human reason.¹ On one memorable November night during his retreat, however, the young man experienced three vivid dreams in rapid succession. The first two dreams featured frightful forces of nature such as buffeting winds that blew him sideways and sparks of fire. They also incorporated baffling elements, like a stranger who offered him an exotic melon from a faraway land. In the third dream, Descartes was presented with a succession of Latin books and poems and invited to ponder his life’s calling. This last dream culminated in a striking realization that the treasury of wisdom left by the ancients (represented by the Latin books) was contradictory and incomplete. Writing about these dream experiences later in a personal notebook, Descartes concluded that dream images so distinct, memorable, and persuasive were surely messages sent from above.²

The irony of all this, of course, is that when Descartes reflected on his dreams, seeking meaning and guidance for his life, he was engaging in precisely the kind of ancient interpretive practice that his work as a philosopher would ultimately call into question. Descartes, often credited as the founder of rationalist philosophy, seems an unlikely disciple of dreams. Yet in seeking meaning in dreams, he was far from unusual. In the early seventeenth century, many elite, well-educated Europeans like Descartes understood dreams as means through which an individual soul might be touched by supernatural forces. Like people in most of the world’s cultures throughout human history, early modern European men and women believed that dreams could be messages from God, the machinations of demons, a visit from the dead, or a vision of the future. Interpreting their dreams in much the same ways as their ancient and medieval forebears had done—indeed, often using the dream guides these forebears had written—they sought to decipher their nighttime visions, rejoicing in the ones heralding good fortune and consulting physicians, clerics, or magical practitioners when their dreams seemed ominous.³

This volume suggests that people of the early modern era—a period that stretches roughly from 1450 to 1800—had a special interest in the meaning of dreams. Attention to early modern discourses about dreams provides a unique opportunity to better understand a critical era of cultural transition. Historically, many cultures treat dreams as valuable sources of knowledge not available by other means. In some cases, the dream is believed to offer connection to the divine; in others, it has been seen as a pathway to obscure inner resources of the unconscious mind. Yet even when dreams are accorded authority as a source of knowledge, they are also sometimes scorned and marginalized, treated as unreliable, difficult to decipher, even deceptive. Those who interpret them have been dismissed as charlatans, whether they were the dream readers at work in the agoras of ancient Greece, medieval visionaries, Native American shamans treating a suffering patient, or medical men sitting behind a psychoanalytic couch. Given this dual quality, dreams and the struggle to explain them offer a unique vantage point from which to examine the social construction of truth and meaning in a historical period often considered the crucible of the modern world.

Although dreaming is of course a universal phenomenon, the essays that follow focus on the role of night dreams and waking visions in the unique constellation of cultures that coalesced around the Atlantic basin during the early modern era. The period witnessed a wave of European colonial expansion into Asia, Africa, and, most extensively, the Americas that launched vast movements of goods and people, instigated conflict, fostered trade, and engendered a new intensity of encounters between cultures that in previous centuries had known little or nothing of one another. Historians use the term Atlantic World, as a shorthand to refer to the Atlantic side of these global interconnections from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. In the Atlantic world, people were drawn into new, often devastatingly exploitative forms of economic exchange and social relations. Simultaneously, European colonial expansion undergirded the construction of modern nation-states and overseas empires.⁴ Perhaps most important here, the colonial encounter shook the foundations of traditional knowledge about the world, human beings, and the divine for both Europeans and the indigenous peoples they met and sought to dominate. Combined with Reformation contests over religious authority, questions about truth and knowledge became particularly urgent. Even as debates over the meaning and reliability of dreams and visions grew in prominence, scrutiny of reported dreams and visions remained a crucial means of interpreting the meanings of these new encounters. The essays that follow demonstrate that individuals met the world-altering changes of this era by deploying established forms of dream interpretation—forms that they endowed with a new significance. Thus, the early modern world left a mark both on dreams themselves and on efforts to understand them.

The essays that follow propose that dreams—as lived, reported, and interpreted—played a significant role in structuring historic change. When men and women experienced dreams, recounted these experiences, settled on meanings, and acted (or not) in response to their nighttime visions, they reimagined the boundaries of their world and negotiated individual and communal responses to changing historical circumstances. These processes go on continually throughout human societies, but they were particularly important in colonial contexts, where European imperialism forced societies with distinct cultures into intimate and uneasy contact with one another; as it did so, indigenous and European ways of reacting to dream phenomena were put to the test in understanding, incorporating, and guiding individuals and communities through the difficult terrain of radical change. Reported dreams and visions, in this sense, played a role in shaping what the early modern Atlantic world would become.

The scholars who have contributed their work to this volume approach dreaming in a variety of ways. Dreams constitute evidence of deeply significant personal experiences, to be sure; yet they are also phenomena that mediate between people or between different registers of social life, and they may serve to shape and authorize collective action. Methodologically, what unites the essays gathered here is that all of the volume’s authors see dream experience as fundamentally social and deeply rooted in the particular contexts of early modern societies. Each of the essays locates reported dreams and visions within their specific historical world, and all of our authors assume that experiences of dreaming and visioning were not merely epiphenomenal reflections of real events, but had the potential to alter the histories of the societies concerned.

We have included essays that represent the scope and variety of current scholarship on dreams and related phenomena in this period, but the reader should not think this volume comprehensive. Some areas are well represented, while many topics of great importance are missing from its pages altogether. The varied and powerful traditions of Central and West African peoples, whether in Africa itself or in New World communities created by men and women forcibly transported to the American continents, are wholly absent. Nor is there as much representation of Native American visionary traditions, including historical shamanic practice, as we had initially sought.

These gaps and omissions reflect the vagaries of the response to our initial call for contributions, but they also reflect the shape of current scholarship of dreaming. All too often, the study of dreams, rather than being a tool for understanding the transformation of the Atlantic world, has instead remained a sidelight or a footnote to the more concrete concerns of economic, political, and social exchange. But a study of early modern cosmologies, both European and indigenous, proves that dreams, visions, and other related experiences continued to hold a significant—sometimes quite a central—place in these societies’ efforts to make sense of the epochal changes in their world. To the extent that the gaps in this collection make clear the missing pieces in scholarship at this time, it could be, we hope, a spur to further study and to the collective endeavor of understanding this crucial period in its own terms.

This introductory essay is intended to provide readers with a review of the historical backgrounds and interpretive approaches from which this volume’s authors draw. It begins with a discussion of the methodological challenges that attend any discussion of dreams. We next summarize the dream beliefs that would have been familiar to early modern Europeans, as well as the different approaches found in Native American societies, identifying major influences and trends in premodern understandings of dreams. Then we explore the ways in which modern scholars have thought about the dreams and visions of the early modern period, creating a historiographical review of the literature on dreams and visions. Throughout, we argue that the events of the early modern era—in particular religious tensions of the Reformation era and colonial encounters—left a remarkably enduring stamp on both premodern and modern understandings of the dream. Taken as a group, the essays gathered here suggest we must nuance the conventional narrative some historians have offered about an orderly progression over time from an external, essentially undifferentiated self to the elaborately interiorized, autonomous, and self-directed individual of modernity. In fact, we contend, the questions we will see raised by early modern people—what weight to give to a dream? Is the knowledge found in dreams true or false? Under what conditions should I listen to my dreams or should they be ignored?—suggest that dreamers have always struggled with the interplay between that which might be thought of as individual experience and that which could be coded as social. Societies never take a single approach to dreams; instead, reported dreams and visions become the occasion for critique, contestation, and controversy among agents—even in our own modern or postmodern world. As puzzling, sometimes obscure texts, reported dreams and visions offer an opportunity to historians who wish to listen in on those contests and critiques.

What Is a Dream? Between the Self and the Social

The dream poses unique challenges for scholars. While modern researchers have argued that the mental act of dreaming is universal across cultures, significant differences inflect the ways dreams are understood, experienced, and used as cultural materials. Consider terminology: in mainstream modern American culture, dreams are familiar events that happen while an individual is sleeping, while visions (presumably experienced during wakefulness) are considered unusual and provoke a more complicated response. Indeed, such visions often are taken as prima facie evidence of psychosis. In the past, a less rigid distinction between waking and sleeping visionary experiences existed; in fact, early modern documents often leave us in some doubt about whether an experience happened when someone was awake or asleep (in our modern terms). People of all cultural backgrounds in the Atlantic world instead focused closely on the identity of the seer and the content of the vision in evaluating its value. This single example reminds us that the phenomenon of dreaming is simultaneously an individual, embodied experience and the product of culture.

Even today, there is no consensus among scientists about the reason why humans (and some animals) dream. In the view of some modern dream researchers, dreams constitute an important way in which the mind integrates and incorporates new developmental challenges.⁵ In this frame the dream is perceived as an actual experience for the dreamer, one that helps the dreamer in processing or in coming to know things that cannot be said or known any other way. As longtime dream researcher Ernest Hartmann recently summarized, dreaming is one form of mental functioning on a continuum running from focused waking thought at one end, through fantasy, daydreaming and reverie, to dreaming at the other end.⁶ Given split and fragmented domains of self-experience, including both conscious and unconscious parts, dreams help to build bridges and promote connection.

Perhaps the two ideas most characteristic of modern views are the notions that dreams and visions emerge from inside the self rather than being an alien intrusion and that these phenomena are not separable from our other mental functioning—in other words, that dreams relate specifically and uniquely to the mental life of an individual. Researchers also tend to speak of dreams as hyper-connective because within them connections [among seemingly disparate ideas, phenomena, words, or images] are made more easily than in waking, and connections are made more broadly and loosely.⁷ They note also that dreams and visions both rely on a pictorial or metaphorical language, and their content is guided by the emotions of the dreamer.⁸ These modern insights about dreams, which take them seriously as developmental experiences for the dreamer, might be fruitful for historians. They suggest important ways that reported nighttime dreams or waking visions might be linked to moments of rupture in the sense of self, such as those that occur in religious conversion or under extremes of cultural conflict and contrast, such as in colonial settings.

Although dreams are, by their nature, individual experiences, dream reporting is a social act. As dream researchers remind us, we never have access to the dream as directly experienced. Only a dreamer knows what the dream looked and felt like, and even his or her experience fades, changes, and alters over time. Instead, we have only a dream as reported—a story told to someone, at a particular time, and for particular purposes. All sorts of questions and evaluations flow from this realization: why is the dream being reported? What is the dreamer’s particular point of view? What kind of credit will the reported dream receive? What patterns of narration or social conventions allow for the dream to seem true?

The scholars in this volume all presume that dreams are born into specific social and cultural contexts that shape both their content and the ways they are reported; thus, even though experienced by a specific person, a dream is simultaneously individual and cultural. As anthropologist Barbara Tedlock has argued, practices of dream interpretation engage dreamers in a social performance of narrating their dreams, in which their interactions with listeners become complex psychodynamic communicative events.⁹ Indeed, much of the methodological challenge of working with dream reports lies in the imperative to consider dream accounts as historical documents whilst pondering the enormous challenge that this form of material poses to historical understanding.¹⁰

Historians have sought methods that would allow them to decipher the complex blends of individual and social factors at play. The noted modern scholar of medieval Europe, Jacques Le Goff, focused on dreams as a fertile category through which to grasp the culture’s fascination with wonders of all sorts. This fascination, he realized, literally shaped what medieval Europeans experienced while sleeping. In that sense, he remarked, dreaming is a collective phenomenon (which is of course why historians should be interested in dreams).¹¹ Study of dream reports thus can offer a privileged glimpse into particular realms of social and cultural experience, illuminating what peoples of the past have found frightening, interesting, or amusing. The images reported by dreamers give us a kind of insight into the past that is rarely available from more conventional historical sources.

Yet, as Le Goff also noted, even though dreams are shaped by social and cultural forces, they are also an important means of individual self-assertion.¹² Dreaming entails self-assertion in numerous ways. While cultures have their own dream etiquettes—etiquettes that shape common understandings about the appropriate contexts in which to discuss dreams—a dreamer chooses her or his moment and means to narrate a vision experience.¹³ In doing so, the dreamer is constructing a persona and building specific forms of connection with others.¹⁴ Historians of dreams must therefore attend to the circumstances that led many dreams to be dismissed, others to be shared orally, and some tiny portion to be written down so that we may know about them. Perhaps the most historically significant opportunity for self-assertion through dreams lies in the choice to reveal a dream to others. For particularly in cultures that attached transcendent significance to dreams, telling a dream was akin to an assertion of visionary or prophetic authority, a type of power sanctioned by a necessarily individual experience. Finally, a further