ABSTRACT
Dreaming is unconscious behaviour which includes striking imagery of social events. Or, dreaming is the continuation of social action by other means. Thus put, dreaming invites complementary investigation from the experimental and social sciences. Yet a meeting of minds as between the two sides has barely occurred. For the experimental sciences (from molecular science through to cognitive science, and taking in psychoanalytic approaches), dreaming amounts to a fundamental human behaviour. But in anthropology and sociology it has been largely regarded as something incidental-as something, moreover, which may be discussed as if scientific appreciations (apart from Freud and Jung) did not exist. The problem, of course, is that the sciences approach dreaming as if it were a universal phenonenon, and their explanations are couched in a distinctively Western discourse. Meanwhile, anthropologists (in the main) offer relativistic appreciations, emphasising the influence of culture on dreaming, ranging from how dreaming is construed through to the meanings people attribute to particular dream imagery (e.g. Tedlock 1987; Jedrej and Shaw 1992).1 This perspective would want to add that even the category of dreaming is culturally relative.
