Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Dream in Western Culture

The Dream in Western Culture

Parman, Susan

Paperback

AnthropologyGeneral European History

ISBN10: 1953218016
ISBN13: 9781953218018
Publisher: Grithman Orm Publishers
Published: Jan 19 2021
Pages: 170
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.37 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE DREAM IN WESTERN CULTURE is an anthropological and historical investigation of conceptions of the dream (its meanings, connections with other ideas, and uses) in Western culture from Greco-Roman times to the present. A byproduct of mammalian biology, dreaming is universal among humans, but cultures differ in how they define and use it. In the West, the dream emerged as a significant symbol that provides a window on Western conceptions of divinity, humanity, health, knowledge, and power as shaped by an underlying structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Homeric conception of the dream as a messenger from the gods (whose complex behavior provided a mythological charter for a unified human self that contained both good and evil) gave way, with the rise of Christianity, to an absolutist model in which the true self (good, god-fearing, rational, masculine, creative, conscious, white/Western, etc.) was bifurcated from the untrue self (evil, humanistic, irrational, feminine, unconscious, non-white/non-Western), the categories of true and untrue dependent on what was considered important in a particular historical era. How we think about dreams in the West is affected by this underlying cultural structure. Originally published under the title DREAM AND CULTURE: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE WESTERN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, the second edition includes two additional chapters that provide biographical information about the author's introduction to dream studies in the sleep lab of Allan Hobson and Fred Snyder at the National Institutes of Health during the 1960s, and how, during her career as an anthropologist and writer, she applied this experience to an understanding of play, creativity, and poetry.

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