Dog Dreams: Oneiric Representations of Interspecies Sociality among Middle-Class Young Adults in the United States

Abstract

Abstract The investigation of human dreaming offers significant insights to scholars of human-nonhuman animal studies. This article proposes that the ways in which companion species appear in humans’ dreams reveal the implicit ontological assumptions that undergird waking-life interspecies relationships. Focusing on dreams about dogs among middle-class U.S. college students, the analysis develops an updated model of dreaming that is synthesized from recent neuroscientific and anthropological theory-building. Themes of warm companionship, anxiety about dogs’ welfare, and preoccupations about their mortality suggest that dreams about dogs simulate and rehearse interspecies sociality in a cultural frame. They demonstrate both interspecies intersubjectivity and the significant place of canine persons in U.S. middle-class dreamers’ conceptualizations of their social networks. Such dreams challenge the public ideology of human exceptionalism, and suggest that human-canine sociality – in both waking and oneiric modes – may emerge as much from “egomorphic” as from anthropomorphic dispositions.