Dreaming as Interaction Douglass Price-Williams Department of Anthropology University of California Los Angeles, CA 90024 dpw@ucla.edu Lydia Nakashima Degarrod Anthropology Department Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine 04011 ldegarrod@polar. bowdoin Abstract Rather than regarding dreams as "things" or property, and grammatically treating them as nouns, the suggestion is to formulate a dream as an activity, label it "dreaming" and more specifically accept dreaming as interactional. For dreaming to be of importance, several psychological factors must be considered, including retention and selection, as well as external factors, such as to whom dreams are reported and their style of communication. Examples from anthropological writers on dreams are provided. It is noted that societal beliefs about dreams tend to influence the amount and types of dreams that are communicated. Dreaming as activity It has become commonplace to assert that our root Indo-European language tends to reify events which are essentially processual in nature. The term "Dream" could be considered just such an example. In English we tend to say that "I had a dream" in the same way as we might say "I had a sore thumb." Some credence can be given to the equivalence of these statements as indeed ostensive definition can be applied to both thumb and dream. A sore thumb can be seen by others, photographed, and measured by clinical instruments. A dream can be detected and indeed measured by virtue of the fact that rapid eye movements in sleep can be associated with dreams. However, there is an important difference between the two cases. It is simply the fact that we depend for our knowledge of a dream upon a person's reported experience. A dream is identified by a statement. It is true that the physiological concomitant of dreams, that is rapid eye movements and other electrical activities in the brain, are found for mammals generally. But the inference is drawn from the one mammal that can communicate in words, that is to say ourselves, so we come back to the verbal report. Although this conclusion may seem obvious and rather trite, it gives rise to more profound implications which we will discuss presently. Apart from the verbal identification, there are many psychological and social factors that go into the dream which we might regard as steps along the flow of Anthropology of Consciousness 7(2):16-23. Copyright © 1996, American Anthropological Association 16