ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I consider accounts of Greek dreams that occurred in moments of anxiety caused either by the dreamer’s own illness or by the serious illness of a close relative.1 The image of a field or pediáda (green meadow, pastureland) recurs in these dreams. These fields can be interpreted as simultaneously personal and collective symbols,2 and I contend that this ambiguity reflects the synthetic, irreducible quality of dream experiences, and no doubt other emotional experiences as well. There has been a temptation to treat emotions and feelings as cognitions, thereby reducing them to culture.3 The limitations of such a view, which cleaves the mind from the body and culture from nature, have become increasingly apparent.4 Underlying this split is another divide that must be repaired-namely the insistence on the strict separation of the individual from the collective.5 The image of the field that I explore here reveals the continuities between the personal and the social, the emotional and the cognitive, and thus offers an example of how these putative dichotomies merge
1 This is an edited version of an article first published in American Ethnologist, 24 (1997): pp. 877-94 and reprinted with permission of the American Anthropological Association.
