Immaterial Objects: Things in Dreams

Abstract

The article presents an alternative world to that of discrete material objects, a world of "dream things." I call it a world because it is organized and various, sensually perceptible, collectively recognized and participated in, represented, theorized and, from the perspectives of the populous genre of the dreambook, early modern dream records, and the customs of the Iroquois and Montagnais nations (among others) during the late contact period, consequential. The article focuses on two of most "thing-like" phenomena in the cultural field of dreams, the dream dictionary and the individual dream about an existing object. It moves chronologically from the medieval corpus of dreambooks (as collated from numerous manuscripts of the Somnium Danielis) to early modern instances of a new genre, the personal dream record, in order to consider the difference made by a developing sense of property (and dream) as private. It concludes by examining a mid-seventeenth-century Huron Indian dream recorded by the Jesuit Missionary Paul Le Jeune: the dreamer was instructed to collect goods from the surrounding tribes as well as the French missionaries in her village — but the latter refused to give up their property.