Dreams, Perception, and Creative Realization

Abstract

This article draws on the ethnography of Aboriginal Australia to argue that perceptual openness, extending from waking life into dreaming experience, provides an important cognitive framework for the apprehension of dreamt experience in these contexts. I argue that this perceptual openness is analogous to the "openness to experience" described as a personality trait that had been linked with dream recall frequency (among other things). An implication of identifying perceptual openness at a cultural rather than at an individual level is two-fold. It provides an example of the ways in which cultural differences affect perception, indicative of cognitive diversity; and, given the relationship between dreams and creativity suggested anecdotally and through research, a cultural orientation toward perceptual openness is also likely to have implications for the realization of creativity that occurs through dreams. Such creativity though cannot be separated from the relational context in which such dreamt material is elaborated and understood.

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.…”

Diversity as Asset

“…And while dreams are universally hyper‐associative and difficult to remember due to physiological and neurological processes presumably shared by all humans, the content of dreams, the way they are experienced, the extent to which they are taken as being significant, thus attended to and remembered, is affected by people's cultural background. To the extent that this background emphasizes dreams as meaningful, directs attention, and encourages the integration of new elements into what is known, does it ultimately affect the realization of creativity (Glaskin, ).…”

“…In others, cultural influences appear to work rather indirectly, in providing an early learning environment for the acquisition of culture‐specific mental models (Watson‐Jones et al., ), by linking (potentially universal) cognitive mechanisms such as folkbiological and folksociological principles or principles of structured learning with specific belief contents (Moya et al., ; Ojalehto et al., ). And cultural influences can be fairly subtle, for instance in that culturally shared concepts and models encourage a certain perspective, orientation, or apprehension (Glaskin, ; Ojalehto et al., ). In each of these cases, “culture” is not a dichotomous variable making groups of people differ with respect to a certain phenomenon, but is a constitutive part of our cognitive, social, and material world.…”

“…As a general tendency, culture's influence is not restricted to content, but extends to cognitive processes, both indirectly (e.g., when properties of cultural tools favor the application of certain cognitive strategies over others) and directly (e.g., when a given phenomenon is explained through the culture‐specific recruitment of reasoning principles). Examples that attest to an indirect influence on cognitive processes include numeration systems, which serve as numerical tools, the properties of which feedback on strategies for counting and calculating (Bender et al., ); the linguistic taxonomies of body parts, which serve as tools for categorization with the power to affect body schemas (Majid & van Staden, ); or cultural models and epistemological orientations, which serve as conceptual tools that can affect perception (Ojalehto et al., ), attention, and memory processes (Glaskin, ), as well as the appraisal of and coping with disconcerting experiences (Luhrmann et al., ). Some of the cultural influences identified in the papers compiled here are more direct in nature, in that they guide reasoning processes, for instance, by shifting focus and attention distinctively to folkbiological or folksociological models, or by suggesting recruitment or activation of some processes rather than others for certain reflections (Moya et al., ; Ojalehto et al., ; Watson‐Jones et al., ).…”

“…Combining the comparative perspective offered by anthropology with insights from cognitive science on how cognitive biases affect basic cognitive behavior could not only afford novel observations but can also help to open interesting and important research agendas (for a similar argument with regard to dreams, see also Glaskin, ).…”