Dream cultures

While dreaming is seen to be a universal phenomenon, conceptions of dreams vary in different cultures and at different times. Several decades of historical and anthropological inquiry have indicated that in any given culture, conceptions of dreams are intimately linked with their place in cosmologies; theological, medical, aesthetic, and philosophical theories about them; individual, therapeutic, and ritual practices accompanying them; and with conceptions of individuality and language. They have also indicated that it is impossible to dissociate dreams from their particular dream cultures.

By contrast, contemporary psychological and neuroscientific theories claim to be in a position to determine the universal essence of the dream as an unchanging entity. At the same time, such theories, while purporting to be independent of their surrounding dream cultures, have been a powerful force in the creation of new dream subcultures. The dream has been utilized to generate new configurations of the personality and the brain, together with new rituals of dream recording, sharing, and retrospective divination, which have been adopted by large social groupings.

In modern Western societies, the cultural location of dreams has been decisively shaped by Freud and Jung. This has taken place through the utilization of dreams in psychotherapy as an interpretative practice, and through the dissemination of Freudian and Jungian dream theories in intellectual circles and popular culture.