Abstract
Sleep is a doorway, and dreams are roads and destinations. In dreams, people visit other places, change the shape of reality, and gain insight into causes and connections secreted beneath the cosmos of waking life. In spite of the diversity of ways culture influences and extracts meanings from dreams, everywhere we see that at least some dreams are understood to be a means of actually traveling across spatial, temporal, and spiritual dimensions. This ubiquitous belief is apparently owed to the common dream experience of the self in motion, being and doing what it cannot in alert consciousness. In this volume, we consider the significance of dreams as an experience of transportation for eleven peoples in Melanesia, Aboriginal Australia, and Indonesia.
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© 2003 Roger Ivar Lohmann
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Lohmann, R.I. (2003). Introduction. In: Dream Travelers. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982476_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982476_1
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