Dreams, memory, and the ancestors: creativity, culture, and the science of sleep

Abstract

Ethnography from Aboriginal Australia attests to the significance of dreams in the creation of new songs, designs, and ceremonies. In this article, I examine the relationships between dreams, memory, and creativity in ritual, design, and song creation. Advances made in neuroscience mean that, increasingly, scientists are able to map neural activity occurring in different sleep phases. Can this capability help us to understand the emergence of creativity, such as that which appears to have its origins in dreams? Drawing on cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, I argue that much of the creativity that emerges from dreams is contingent on memory. Memory is both biological and cultural, so culture is implicated in how dreams are imaginatively shaped, remembered, reported, and experienced. Thus, an important link between the apparently autonomous aspects of dreams and the resulting creativity that has been reported in many cultures around the world, in ethnography and by dreamers themselves, is the encultured work of memory. Résumé L’ethnographie de l’Australie aborigène témoigne de l’importance des rêves dans la création de nouveaux chants, dessins et cérémonies. L’auteure examine ici les relations entre rêves, mémoire et créativité dans la création de rituels, de dessins et de chants. Grâce aux progrès des neurosciences, il est possible de cartographier de plus en plus précisément l’activité neuronale dans les différentes phases du sommeil. Cet outil nous aidera‐t‐il à comprendre l’émergence de la créativité lorsque celle‐ci semble prendre sa source dans les rêves ? À partir des données de la psychologie cognitive et de la neurophysiologie, l’auteure affirme qu’une grande partie de la créativité née des rêves est liée à la mémoire. La mémoire étant à la fois biologique et culturelle, la culture intervient dans la manière dont l’imagination donne forme aux rêves et dont le sujet se souvient de ceux‐ci, les relate et les vit. Le travail de mémoire intégré dans la culture constitue donc un lien important entre les aspects apparemment autonomes des rêves et la créativité qui en résulte et qui a été rapportée dans de nombreuses cultures du monde, que ce soit dans l’ethnographie ou par les rêveurs eux‐mêmes.

Existential economics: Mexican-American dream strategies to predict and understand business outcomes

“…However, he did cross into generative theory when he revealed his belief that until he encountered the Key or the Formula in his dreams, he probably would not be able to achieve a high level of economic success in the United States. Ranulfo's mixture of discernment, message, and generative theories could also fit under the rubric of prescient dreams, the term Glaskin (, 51–52) uses when applying these same three dream theories from Lohmann's paradigm in an Australian Aboriginal context. The term prescient is also used by Jacobson () when speaking of Puerto Rican dreams, further suggesting that it is a useful rubric when only one shorthand term is needed.…”

Current Perspectives on Cognitive Diversity

“…It has been known for some time that attention itself may also be susceptible to cultural influences, with North Americans tending to be less attentive to contextual information than East Asians ( Nisbett and Masuda, 2003 ; Masuda and Nisbett, 2006 ), and especially so when asked to construct narratives of their observation ( Senzaki et al, 2014 ). Attention can also, in line with cultural predispositions, be more or less explicitly directed to the quasi-perceptual experiences in hallucinations ( Luhrmann et al, 2015 ) or dreams ( Glaskin, 2011 , 2015 ), guiding their interpretation and even the way in which people deal with them.…”

Dreams, Perception, and Creative Realization

“…Many anthropologists working in Australia with different Aboriginal groups have noted the significance of the relationship between Aboriginal cosmology and dreams (e.g., Dussart, :139–176; Glaskin, , , ; Keen, ; Myers, ; Poirier, ; Tonkinson, , ). The relationship between nocturnal dreams and the creative epoch (“the Dreaming”) varies between different Aboriginal societies, with, for example, some groups using the same linguistic term (such as tjukurrpa ) to refer to both, and others linguistically differentiating between them (Keen, ).…”

“…The process through which such dreamt material becomes incorporated into ritual is a social one. The meaning and the significance of such dreams are intersubjectively constituted, and this occurs within a particular social and cosmological framework that informs both how these dreams are interpreted and understood, and, as I have argued elsewhere, how they are perceived and remembered prior to this (Glaskin, ). Like other aspects of consciousness, dream experiences are shaped by cultural ontologies and expectations.…”