Strange Encounters: Dreams and Nightmares of High School Students in Papua New Guinea1

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe material for this paper is drawn from essays written, as part of their ordinary class work, by a group of Papua New Guinea High School students, under the title ‘Recently I had a Dream’. The paper offers a content analysis of this material.The categories employed to present and analyse the data are rooted in the assumption that a dream may be likened to the performance of a play or a film viewed on the screen. The dream, that is, tends to be a vivid inner visual as well as an affective experience. Focus on the emotional response that the dream evokes yields a simple scheme that enables one to identify and classify the themes and motifs that the dreams reveal: positive affect (i.e. supportive of the dreamer) or negative (i.e. seen as somehow threatening the dreamer). But the picture may also be more complicated as where there are mixed or changing emotions.Positive affect was reported of those dreams experienced as pleasant or ‘good’; most of these were plainly of the wish‐fulfilment type. But well over half of the students reported experiencing negative affect, emotions ranging in intensity from nervousness through being frightened or scared to terror or being panic stricken. Anxiety indeed was the predominant emotion that found its most frequent expression in strange encounters with grotesque looking creatures which threatened the dreamer's very existence. In what kind of experience(s) was such anxiety rooted? In seeking an answer the data were approached, after the manner of peeling an onion, from a number of perspectives: the sociological (the social situation of the school), the cultural (the relevance of traditional factors, and the psychological (the role of the unconscious). On the last point, the views of the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, set out in his classic study ‘On the Nightmare’, were not found to be helpful. On the other hand, more recent strands in psychoanalytic thinking appear to offer a more promising line of attack.