Dreaming Culture by Jeannette Mageo

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Dreaming Culture by Jeannette Marie Mageo

Who has not exchanged accounts of "weird" dreams with friends and loved ones? Yet how often do we question the meanings and implications of these seemingly random and nearly always absurd scenarios that transpire in our minds during sleep? Those, like me, who have strong reservations about psychoanalytic theory, are likely to dismiss dream content as the product of the brain's necessary processing of all the sensory, mental and emotional input that bombards it during the waking day, mere static, the brain "rebooting" itself, no more than that. Dr. Mageo's interesting and instructive little book made me take another look.

To casually swap dreams with one or two others is one thing. Dr Mageo has talked dreams with one hundred and fourteen participating undergraduates in her course, "The Self and Culture." It was a highly purposeful and carefully organized conversation, during the course of which she asked her students to write dream account papers drawing upon "dream journals" for material. For their journals she suggested a pen and paper at bedside for recording upon awakening dreams that would otherwise probably be forgotten. Later, on a strictly voluntary basis, students analyzed their own dreams by means of several techniques that Dr. Mageo modeled for them in analysis of example dreams of her own. The purpose of the course was not to probe the depths of the students' individual psychologies nor to combine therapy with instruction. It was, rather, to explore the connections between the very private world of the dreaming mind and the culture at large.

In Dr. Mageo's more specific terms, the question might be: how do dreams "think about" cultural models? My understanding of "cultural model" is a set of shared meanings and expectations, not always explicit, that conditions people's responses and reactions to social life. Models, of course are not set in stone, but ever subject to the transforming power of those same individual responses and reactions that they evoke. One arena, Dr. Mageo suggests, for attempted resolutions of this tension is the dream world. It is there that, as if in some weird theater of the absurd, inner conflicts and uncertainties about one's proper place in social life manifest in strange metaphorical images.

For some readers of a more "Psycho-sociological" bent, I think the notion of dreams as a space "...in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency..." is highly relevant to considerations of broad social change. Other readers like me, perhaps less scholarly and more in search of "good stories," can find fascinating narratives in the student dream accounts. These accounts become even more interesting when Mageo, as a method of analysis applies what she calls, "dream play." Dream play is a little drama in which the dreamer imagines herself as one element, i.e. a person or object, in her dream and then engages that element, be it mirror, mud puddle, mountain road, friend, or rival, in a dialogue that reminds one very much of some scene on a dramatic stage. For readers and writers of drama and prose fiction what a prolific generator of highly imaginative stories!

Whatever the temptation for the casual lreader to be distracted by the narrative possibilities of the student dream accounts, he must not ignore Mageo's analyses of them lest he miss, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of this book. And that is Mageo's ,slueth-like, consistent, and insightful pursuit of meaning in each individual dream drama. It is for this, though "Dreaming Culture" is a scholarly work sometimes couched in technical language, that I would recommend it to the general reader with a four star rating.



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