ABSTRACT
Dream investigators often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries between physiology and psychology, literature and psychology, psychology and religion, etc. However, dream researchers have not carefully examined the methodological issues that arise during their interdisciplinary ventures. There is considerable institutional support for disciplinary ethnocentrism, including university departmental structures and relations among professional organizations. Specifically, the author argues that scholars in both the humanities and human sciences classify individual entities according to some conception of their similarity and that explication of the conceptions defining such classes is a genuine accomplishment in either the humanities or the human sciences. Anthropologists have shown particular interest in culture pattern dreams, i.e., dreams that are sought because they reflect and maintain the spiritual traditions of a specific culture. Cartwright's participants were queried about their dreams after being systematically awakened from sleep, whereas some reports in Radin's study seem to describe waking dreams.
