Dreams : a sociological analysis.

Abstract

This exploratory study investigates the imprint of dreaming experiences on waking life. Specifically, it seeks to describe and analyze ethnographic cases of how Hindus in Singapore, through narration or performance integrate dreaming and waking life. Based on in-depth interviews and dream records collected as part of this study, I extend to a theory of the visionary episteme (Foucault 1980:197). I organize this discussion around three basic themes – that dreams and/or dreaming (a) have strongly influenced the beliefs and practices of those studied, (b) and reason are not mutually antagonistic, and, (c) is a primal wellspring of religious experience. With the development of sociological approaches that examine topics previously defined as psychological, such as the sociology of emotion and cognition, the seemingly idiosyncratic components of these nocturnal productions should not exclude them from social analysis.