Fields in dreams: anxiety, experience, and the limits of social constructionism in Modern Greek dream narratives

Abstract

In this study of Greek dreams at moments of illness and anxiety I explore the relationship between individual experience and cultural representation. Ethnographic data and textual sources show that the image of fields recurs in dreams, thus throwing into question the uniqueness of personal experience as well as the concept of “experience” as something separate from cultural narratives. Yet these same images might also be independently generated “from below” by the emotional, physical experience of distress and illness. This case points to the convergence of cultural and personal symbols and to their fusion in the moment of experience. Approaches from psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, anthropology, and folklore studies all provide possible theorizations. None of these options excludes the others. The image of the field in dreams is overdetermined precisely because the historicocultural, the cognitive, the psychobiological, and the social all simultaneously figure in human experience.