ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a topic California as a land of visions, but the word vision has two common meanings. One meaning of vision is experiential: a vision as a kind of altered state of consciousness, ranging from hallucinations to an REM dream. The chapter addresses ethnographic and prehistoric native California as a land of dreams, and California archaeology as a practice where ideals can be realized. Contemporary Euro-Americans pay little heed to dreams, and archaeologists do typically even less, reflecting the behaviorist and materialist origins of the discipline and the resulting view that cognitive phenomena like dreams are epiphenomenal. This attitude contrasts sharply with native Californian social and cultural life, where dreams had a central role. The distribution of dreams, and one of their correlates, socio-political power, is archaeologically identifiable partly in the distribution of rock art sites. Rock art sites are visible and impressive aspects of the archaeological record, but they are typically rare.
