Fields in Dreams: Anxiety, Experience, and the Limits of Social Constructionism in Modern Greek Dream Narratives

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 in human experience. The challenge is to develop a sufficiently broad analytical framework to cope with the complexity of experience.