Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era

The theme of this study is encapsulated in the startling cover illustration, an 18th-century folk painting of a white Virginian embracing a black woman while another thrashes a black man with a stick. Mechal Sobel, history professor at the University of Haifa, analyzes 200 letters, diaries, and autobiographies from the America of 1740 to 1840, more than half of which describe dreams and visions. Observing that "Today the acceptance of an inner consciousness of self is so widely taken for granted that it is hard to realize how modern this development is," Sobel sees in the dreams a progression from passive to active, and he places the awakening of individual self-awareness during this period. The impetus for this development she attributes to "opposition to an enemy other." Blacks and whites regarded each other as alien, the "enemy other," a concept reinforced by friction between men and women as they struggled with rigid gender expectations. The raw sociological material given is fascinating, the background well drawn, the statistics enlightening: for example, of the 2.6 million population of the Colonies in 1774, half a million were black. The material is viewed through a narrow lens, however, with all social conflicts given either a racial or gender-oriented interpretation. Dreams are prominent in the native cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Australia. One of the contributions of this study is the recognition that Anglo-Americans also turned to them for an understanding of their lives. Teach Me Dreams is an original and valuable addition to the rich literature on both history and dream analysis. --John Stevenson