Dreams as Deep Play: Toward a Cultural Understanding of Dreaming

This article develops a cultural theory of those dreams with rich imagery and developed plots that are likely to be dreamt in rapid-eye-movement sleep. Such dreams, it argues, are an instance of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “deep play.” For Geertz, deep play is play with “an image … a model, a metaphor” that makes visible fundamental cultural structures. Image metaphors for cultural models often appear in dreams. Deep play in dreams, I argue, subjects cultural models to destabilizing play in order to adapt them to the dreamer's experience and to confront threats to the dreamer's identity that models for being a person can pose. Dreamers destabilize models by ambiguating images that represent them in seven ways outlined in the article. Ambiguity stops the mind from settling on a single meaning. This inability triggers hyper-associations that challenge and subvert a model's given meanings. Two dreams from an undergraduate who participated in a study of dreaming at a major Northwestern university illustrate these ideas.