ABSTRACT
“It was only a dream,” we tell children when they awaken from a scary dream. It is also something we might tell ourselves—depending on the dream, either with relief or disappointment. But for me, having done fieldwork among Muslim dreamers in Cairo, the very premise of “it was only a dream” has destabilized. The “only” is heavy with assumptions, among them the idea that wakeful perception or rational thought offer a more reliable window into reality than dreams ever could. A Freudian version pitches the “only” somewhat differently in that dreams here are the royal road into the unconscious, a realm of great significance but confined to the individual. In numerous religious traditions, by contrast, dreams are taken to offer a window into a metaphysical reality, one that far exceeds the dreamer. The line between dream and waking life, moreover, is not a given. Victorian anthropologist EB Tylor, widely credited with having introduced the topic of dreams into anthropology, famously claimed that “primitives” seem to lack the ability or willingness to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions. For this very reason, he argued in Primitive Culture (1871), the dream experience lies at the heart of religion. Because “primitives” see their dead ancestors in dreams, they take them to still be around and develop a belief in souls. This lays the ground for animism and ultimately for religion: first polytheism, then an increasingly abstracted monotheism. To Tylor, in the end, the “primitives” were mistaken. Despite hints at a “continuity of philosophic speculation from savage to cultured thought” and the “debts which civilized philosophy owes to primitive animism” (30), he tells an evolutionary story that relies on, and constructs, a contrast between the “lower races” and the “educated moderns.” Yet if we look beyond this problematic evolutionary storyline, we find that Tylor’s central insight—dreams are foundational to religious beliefs—resonates with a range of dream cultures. In many dream cultures, certain dreams are highly valued, are not dichotomously opposed to waking life, and cannot be captured or contained through the phrase “only a dream.”
