Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes

Abstract

What does it mean to envision or dream a world into existence? Dreams and visions are often deeply personal and private experiences, but they also open up social spaces for worldmaking. From Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime” to the ethnographic dreams of anthropologists and their research partners, many dreams and visions are entangled with the historical and analytical trajectories of anthropology. I set out in this article to stretch further the anthropological imagination about the kinds of dreams and visions that may emerge from any dreamscape. To this end, I show that the anthropology of dreams and visions is built on more than the interpenetration of dreaming and waking life, metaphysical questions, problems of communication and interpretation, active or passive dreaming, the powerful idioms that dreams afford for collective visions, or nightmares and metaphorical dreaming. Myriad dreams and visions also unfold as what I call cosmological visions that shape anthropology and vice versa.