Dreaming Culture: Meanings, Models, and Power in U.S. American Dreams (2011)

Dreams seem the most private territory of experience. Yet Dreaming Culture argues they are a space in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency. Through an innovative "dream ethnography" from college students in the northwestern U.S., this book contributes to recent research on dreaming and the brain in psychology and continuing research on dreaming and the self in clinical psychology and psychological anthropology. Dreaming Culture uses critical theory to understand power relations embedded in cultural models, a perspective often lacking in cognitive anthropology and in psychological studies of self and mind.