How we dream

Last Friday I wrote about how sleeping, which seems to be something totally biological, can also be cultural, because across societies, there can be sharp differences in the way we look at sleeping: where we sleep, when we sleep, really how we sleep.

I mentioned dreaming in passing, and thought I might as well expand that into an entire column. I mentioned the studies of one American anthropologist, Doug Hallan, who notes that Americans almost never remember their dreams, much less talk about them. He compared the Americans to the Toraja, an ethnic group in Indonesia, who look at dreaming on a continuity with our activities when we are awake. They see dreams as ways of connecting with the spirits, with the deceased. Not surprisingly, the Toraja remember, and talk about, their dreams.

Many Filipinos would relate to the Toraja. Dreams are important to us, and are constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted as we talk about them in conversations with relatives and friends.

I grew up hearing relatives, especially women, sharing their dreams, and I meant nighttime dreaming. Often they would talk about, well, talking with the dead in these dreams, almost as if the departed were still around. The older ones would fret about those dreams, interpreting these as the dead coming to call them to the next life.

Some of the stories are almost funny. When one of my maternal grandmothers, an avid mahjong player, passed away, one of her co-players died shortly after. At family reunions I’d overhear the older women talking about the two remaining mahjong mates complaining that they had dreamt about their erstwhile co-players… and worrying who would be next. The remaining two did live a few more years before being called to the great mahjong table in the sky.

Freud

The mahjong dreams happened when I was in college. I had been exposed to psychology in school, and had read Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” I was fascinated with the dream stories, which for Freudians were reflective of our subconscious desires and aspirations, frustrations and fears. So when we see a deceased relative in our dreams, we’re really confronting our own subconscious.

Going back to local cultures, on a day-to-day basis we have many more mundane interpretations of our dreams.  We sometimes fear the dreams as predicting a misfortune, but there are times, too, when we see the dreams as a kind of celestial tip—for example, numbers for a lotto ticket. Or we may dream of someone we are interested in, and take it as a chance that we are headed for a happy relationship.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see that there’s so much of wishful thinking in such interpretations. Rather than predicting what might happen, dreaming reinforces what we want to happen.

Or, in more unpleasant dreams, we might end up with self-fulfilling prophecies, our worst fears becoming reality because we are so overwhelmed by our trepidations.

We fear unpleasant dreams or nightmares. Bangungot (or the dreaded folk illness where someone who is sleeping feels like he is being suffocated, or oppressed by a heavy weight) can mean a nightmare—I still hear people talking about the Arroyo presidency as a 9-year bangungot.  Failure to wake up, or at least to move a finger or a toe, leads to death. The term itself is derived from bangon (to wake up) and ungol (to moan).

There is a field of study called psychological anthropology, which involves studying how people interpret their mind, their psyche. Dreams figure prominently in many of the ethnographies or descriptions of cultures.

Dreaming is especially important in health and illness. Many cultures, including those in the Philippines, view sleeping and dreaming as activities of our spirit-stuff (I don’t want to call them “souls,” which is a Christian concept, while the spirit-stuff or essence is precolonial). If the spirit-stuff gets caught up with dreaming and fails to return to the body, the person will fall ill. Prolonged absence can even mean death.

Folk healers are also called to their “vocations” by saints or spirits appearing in their dreams. The stories of folk healers often have strong religious themes—of being in church, for example, with a holy book floating around and coming to their possession.

‘Dream theories’

Preparing for this column, I went to our library and looked up a book I read many years ago by Kilton Stewart, an American psychological anthropologist, titled “Pygmies and Dream Giants.” It’s written in popular style, with a touch of the sensational, with a focus on Negrito groups. In that book and in other more scholarly articles appearing in science journals, Stewart writes about how Negrito groups in the Philippines and Malaysia have “dream theories” that resonate with modern psychology.

Stewart writes about how Negrito adults encourage their children to talk about their dreams, which they see as reflective of the children’s insecurities and fears. If a child dreams of an encounter with a wild animal, for example, they are encouraged to try to dream again about that encounter, and to fight the animal. Or, if they dream of quarreling with a friend, the child is asked to talk with that friend, and to find out if perhaps something he or she did had offended that friend.

Today there are psychologists looking at lucid dreaming, where people are taught how to be more conscious about their dreams, and even to be “conscious” while dreaming, to confront and resolve subconscious fears.

In a 1972 article in Psychological Perspectives, Stewart writes extensively about dream theories among the Senoi Negritos of Malaysia. I loved this passage about pleasurable dreams: “[Such dreams] should be continued until they arrive at a resolution… For example, one should arrive somewhere when he flies, meet the beings there, hear their music, see their designs, their dances, and learn their useful knowledge.”

I thought of older T’boli weavers of tnalak or bark cloth, who acquire the designs for their weaving in their dreams—and Australian aboriginal artists, who are inspired by “dream time.”

There’s more to discover, beyond Stewart, who did his fieldwork many years ago about how we dream, maybe even why we dream.

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