Invisible elites? Authority and the dream.

Abstract

This paper seeks to develop a perspective on the dynamic interplay between dreaming, culture and identity. A spectrum of examples show that dream imagery has had and still has today tremendous cultural significance across a whole array of historical, religious and contemporary political and personal contexts. The visionary dream is shown to have underpinned the charter myths of both Israel and Serbia/Kosovo as well as having been the generative source of a core body of hierarchically organised spiritual knowledge in Islamic societies, possibly including the Taliban. Annunciation and calling dreams are commonplace in shamanic and some other societies and individuals can have dreams that prefigure aspects of their developing personal myths. The power and politics of dreaming is further exemplified in the author's example from his dreamwork group that suggest we can dream within the cultural and oppressive stereotypes of our gendered and racist time. Our experience of reality is presented as being dynamically co-created out of both the normative events of everyday life as well as from the human experience of the dream in its powerful and politically evocative forms.