ABSTRACT
This chapter includes the accounts of Greek dreams that occurred in moments of anxiety caused either by the dreamers own illness or by the serious illness of a close relative. Since Lincoln's study, anthropologists have often concentrated on how dreams are culturally patterned and socially interpreted. The chapter also includes a discussion about dreams by a middle-aged woman from the Naxos mountain village of Kronos who described how Saint Nektarios once healed her. Contemporary dream research substantiates Aristotle's assertion that in sleep somatic sensations can be converted into visual dream presentations of the onset of illness. The perennial appearance of fields in dreams of anxiety and suffering could, according to anthropology of experience, be understood as the result of cultural motifs available through oral and literate traditions that began with Old and New Testaments. An acceptance of dreams as complex human phenomena requires an admission that there exist multiple approaches involving simultaneous avenues of interpretation: cognitive psychological, psychoanalytic, and anthropological.
