Dream Singers: The African American Way with Dreams

by Anthony Shafton

Overview

Advance Praise for Dream-Singers "You will find a great storehouse of folk and literary treasures in this ambitious book that speaks to anyone who has ever thought about his or her dreams. It's a wonderful adventure and I highly recommend it."-Clarence Major, author of Configurations and Juba to Jive Acclaim for Dream Reader also by Anthony Shafton "A book so unique in its combination of scholarship, clarity, and down-to-earth feeling about dreams that I find it hard to fully express the excitement and satisfaction I felt on reading it."-Montague Ullman, M.D., Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Author of Working with Dreams and Dream Telepathy "Breathtaking . . . the single most complete and thorough analysis of contemporary dream theories yet written . . . Shafton has a keen sense for what people most want to know about dreams, and an admirable ability to explain difficult concepts without oversimplifying them."-Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., Past President, The Association for the Study of Dreams, Author of The Wilderness of Dreams

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630260484
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/08/2002
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

ANTHONY SHAFTON is a writer and independent scholar who has been researching and writing on the subject of dreams since the early 1980s. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard and a master's in creative writing from Stanford. Shafton began researching African American dreams in 1990 and has published on the subject in Dream Time, the magazine of the Association for the Study of Dreams. He lives in Indiana.

Read an Excerpt

Part One: A Reverence for Dreams

Chapter 1: Through the Porthole of Dreams

Dreams, my mama taught me, do not lie.
--Shay Youngblood

The poetry and power of dreams have attracted me since childhood. Like many people, I've always known by intuition that dreams have meanings that matter. But when I was already in my forties, a spell of particularly intense and suggestive dreams riveted my attention. I felt then that I had to learn how dreams work and what they mean.

I began going to workshops on dream interpretation. I joined groups that meet to share and discuss their dreams. I attended conferences with presentations by experts who ran the gamut from laboratory investigators to lifestyle gurus. I studied hundreds of research papers and shelves of scholarly and popular books. A preoccupation became an occupation, and eventually I turned out a book of my own, a survey of contemporary approaches to the understanding of dreams that was published in the mid-1990s.

The seed of this present book, about African Americans and dreams, was planted at the first major conference I attended. This was my first look at the collection of individuals who make dreams a career in America. And it disturbed me to see next to no black faces. I questioned the conference organizers, who told me they were also disturbed but didn't know how to recruit more black members to their organization.

The fact is, there are scarcely any African Americans among the researchers, instructors, and authors in this field. Very few blacks attend their conferences and workshops. And blacks are poorly represented among the dreamers they write about.

What, I wondered, would black psychologists say about this profile. Those I sought out recognized the situation I described to them. None blamed racism. Instead, they found the cause in black preferences. In brief, they explained that black psychologists-in-training would view dreams as a fringe field and a poor career choice. And blacks in general might perceive some of the approaches to dreams being offered as too narrowly psychological, other approaches as too New Age, too feel-good spiritual. Black culture, they emphasized, has its own lively traditions about dreams.

This drew my interest. The psychologists sketched some of these traditions as we talked, but could direct me to few books or articles. For as I soon confirmed at the library, hardly any studies have been devoted to the dreams of black Americans.

Around this time I happened to hear about the dream of a community activist named Marion Stamps in Chicago where I then lived. Her dream, which I'll describe in chapter 2, had inspired her to take a certain action to reduce gang violence. Because I had an interest in the social relevance of dreams, and because she was black, I thought I'd try to interview her. She agreed, and thus I received my first real exposure to the richness of African American beliefs and attitudes surrounding dreams. Her eloquence on the subject and her forthcomingness encouraged me to undertake this study.

Eventually I interviewed 116 African Americans. In selecting people to approach for interviews, I sought a cross section by age, occupation, and so on, while at the same time keeping an eye out for those who might be eloquent on the subject of dreams. Some of the most eloquent turned out to be ordinary folk, but I did end up with a disproportionate number of people in the arts. This appears not to have caused a bias in the sample, however. With very few exceptions, the essential characteristics of the dream experiences and beliefs of artists and nonartists were the same.

In addition to interviewing this group, I also interviewed eight youngsters at Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, and I obtained written answers to questionnaires I submitted to twenty-five African American male prison inmates around the country.

There's a question I'm often asked by whites when I say I've done this study. "How did you get your material?" they inquire with puzzlement. What they mean is, "How did you ever manage to come in contact with enough blacks?" This question naively reflects the racial separateness of most white lives in America. But I'm happy to say I had no trouble finding people to interview, and got turned down very much less often than I expected myself.

Sometimes the "How did you get your material?" question also means, "Are black people really open with a white interviewer?" Whether the interviewees were open or not you'll judge for yourself. But one good indication is the number of them who passed me along to family or friends.

In addition to the interviews, I have taken black literature as a primary resource, weaving literary examples into discussions of the separate strands of the dream culture at almost every point. For as I quickly and happily discovered, the African American way with dreams runs like a broad vein though this literature. There for anyone to see in novels, short stories, autobiographies, plays, and poetry is plentiful evidence of the place of dreams in African American life. Fiction in particular depicts the ways families socialize their children to dreams, the reasons dreams get shared or withheld, and the sorts of interpretations they receive.

Furthermore, the existence of a literature with this vein running through it is in itself noteworthy. One function of literature is education in the broadest sense. Literature conveys values from the past into the present, often questioning them and revising them as it does so. For dreams, the treasury of African American literature performs that broad educational task amply and in many cases with full intention.

Another question I'm sometimes asked, by blacks as well as by whites, is, "Are black people's dreams really different?" This is a fair question. The short answer is, "No, but their beliefs and attitudes about dreams are different." In reality, the situation is more complicated. What we think, feel, and do while we're awake influences our dreams. So our waking-life beliefs about dreams can influence what we dream at night, which in turn reinforces what we believe. While the dreaming process is humanly universal, people can learn to be sensitive--or insensitive--to various dimensions of the dream life. Cultural groups develop their own distinct ways with dreams, seen in how they talk about dreams, in what they expect from dreams, and also to some extent in the content of their dreams.

What I want to emphasize here by way of introduction is simply this: African Americans as a group believe that dreams matter.

A Reverence for Dreams

"Dream-singers all,--/ My people," Langston Hughes wrote proudly.

"I think that black people, they respect their dreams and what happens in those dreams." These are the words of interviewee Diane Dugger, a hospital lab technician. "And their life," she went on, "a lot of times revolves around dreams."

Poet Sterling Plumpp asserted that dreams are "at the core of black culture." He was speaking of hopes, but at the same time of night dreams. "I think that you are literally submerged," Plumpp continued, "and often the portholes are through dreams."

Not so many decades ago, "everybody talked about dreams," recalled Frances Callaway Parks, a fifty-one-year-old college professor and writer who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. Looking back on her childhood, she remembered:

When people got up, they commented about the weather. They also commented about how they slept, and if they dreamed. And that was a part of the culture. People would say, "I had a dream." And then they'd go on all day. Any person coming around them, they'd share that dream with. And there were certain people, if they dreamed, everybody paid attention to what they dreamed. They had reputations for dreaming, and dreamed very accurately. . . . Those people whose dreams were observed by the community would often be true.

Fifty-seven-year-old Marva Pitchford Jolly, a ceramic sculptor, made a similar observation about the rural Mississippi of her childhood, where "folk often met each other and said, 'I've been dreaming about peas or dogs or whatever. ' " But Jolly voiced contradictory views about the present status of such informal dream-sharing networks. She said that "this still happens in the black community," but later regretted that "it's all gone now. 'Cause you don't really have community. People live in buildings." Jolly lives now in Chicago.

But the reality is that it does still happen, even if less regularly than before, and even if the networks have mostly been reduced to family, lovers, and close friends--who in any case have always made up the core of dream-sharing networks. Writer Eileen Cherry, age forty-two, who also lives in Chicago, was describing her past when she reminisced about the custom of "playing the numbers" from dreams, but she also said:

My mother and sisters, and people in my family, we talk about our dreams, all the time, like "Ooo, I dreamt about Aunt Pat last night," "Ooo, I had this dream about'cha," and "What did you dream last night?" But it's connected to reaching out, it's connected to community, it's connected to another level of communication. And the dreamwork in the African American community is connected to the religious experience. So it's embedded in my life.

Testimony such as this begins to convey the real texture of the African American way with dreams.

Some people have, perhaps, absorbed the indifference and skepticism that prevail in the mainstream toward dreams. Yet even a total skeptic like historian and developer Dempsey Travis acknowledged that dreams "were very important" in the family and community he came up in. "They would guide one's life." Travis dismissed traditional black beliefs about dreams as relics of the past. But the president of a museum of African American history, Kimberly Camp, embraced those beliefs and affirmed their present standing as "very much parts of an African American experience."

There are also whites, especially some of eastern European and Mediterranean descent, who value dreams through their own European ethnic traditions. Others have grown interested in dreams through trends in popular psychology and personal growth. But Judith Anne (Judy) Still, daughter of composer William Grant Still, was one of many interviewees to voice the opinion that as a whole "Afro-American people are more cordial to their dreams than white people." I was told that blacks give "a certain significance" to dreams which "Europeans" do not (Nelson Peery, political activist), are "more willing to talk about their dreams" (Darryl Burrows, civic organization director), and "feel more spiritual about them" than white people (Yolanda Scheunemann, psychotherapist). Psychologist Maisha Hamilton-Bennett said:

Dreams have a reverence in the African American community, much more so than in the white community.... I think a lot of whites have more of a tendency to dismiss their dreams as just some meaningless incoherent nonsense that happened "when I was sleeping" and not connect it with their life. Whereas African Americans will connect it.

Is there evidence to support these observations about black/ white differences with respect to dreams? As we'll see, there is. Despite the fact that this book is about African Americans and not about European Americans, I did want to be able to compare the two. So for that purpose I conducted brief interviews about dreams with a sample of 80 whites who roughly match the profile of the 116 African American interviewees. And I have drawn certain conclusions on the basis of that evidence, even though I realize some people disapprove of all interracial comparisons, believing that they inevitably serve to reinforce prejudices and stereotypes, no matter how well-intentioned. Obviously I don't agree. And I can only hope that any unintended outcome of that sort which arises from this book is more than offset by its value as a resource for all persons interested in dreams and culture.

To affirm that African Americans have a traditional way with dreams is not to say that African Americans all have the same dream experiences, or all think about dreams the same way. To the contrary, surrounding the core of beliefs and attitudes which this book mainly describes there exists, I believe, at least as much diversity in the African American community as in any other--in fact, probably more, as a result of the attention paid to dreams in this community. The diversity and nuances of viewpoint revealed in this book are as vital to the whole picture as the core beliefs and attitudes.

Something also to bear in mind is that people hold their beliefs with various degrees of certainty, consistency, and tolerance for ambiguity. There are hard skeptics. There are naive accepters. There are those in transition. There are those who embrace traditional beliefs as part of a broad enhancement of their identity. And there are those who hold belief and doubt in tension. Take as one example Reverend Marshall Hatch.

Reverend Hatch serves a Baptist church on Chicago's West Side. He is also working for his doctorate in divinity at a Presbyterian theological seminary affiliated with the University of Chicago:

I'm personally not that affected by dreams, I don't believe. I've gone to school, so I've been affected by Western, rational thought. But the people that I minister to have not been affected. Whatever culture has evolved out of the southern culture, people still are very much a part of it. For them dreams are--and I guess I've been affected by it, because they've made pretty convincing arguments to me. And for them dreams are part of reality. And of course it's related to the spiritual. People believe in it. They believe that that's how God communicates to them. That's very much a part of African American culture. So I've been influenced, you know, again.

The Ground to Be Covered

Reverend Hatch holds that his beliefs about dreams, along with his community's beliefs, are still strongly influenced by the African culture of their ancestors. I, too, as I pursued the research for this book, became convinced that the beliefs carried from Africa centuries ago still powerfully shape the African American way with dreams. Part Two gives an overview of this connection.

Then Part Three examines the fabric of the African American dream heritage. In the course of that discussion, I will point out specific African influences where appropriate.

• Nowhere is that influence more conspicuous than in the prevalence of ancestor dreams, the topic of chapter 3.
• Chapters 4 through 7 concern predictive dreaming, a prominent feature of African American dream beliefs, again showing the African influence. Chapter 4 deals with predictive dreaming generally, then the following three chapters explore dream signs, numbers dreams, and dreams connected with déjà vu.
• The African influence will again be touched upon in chapter 8 in connection with an openness to dreamlike experiences in the waking state that distinguishes black Americans from white Americans. Chapter 9 follows up with a discussion of specific altered states of consciousness: visions, voices, and presences, as well as several other altered states less emphasized in African American dream culture.
• The spirituality of dreaming is at the heart of the African American dream experience and permeates this entire book. But here we take up three special links between dreams and spirituality. And here, again, some traces of African influence will be discerned. Chapter 10 describes the place of dreams in organized religion. Chapter 11 is about dreams in hoodoo. And chapter 12 explains the folk belief in "witches riding you."
• Chapter 13 takes up a special subject, dreaming about race. Race dreams definitely are part of the African American experience of dreams, even though dreams on this theme aren't traditional in the way that, for example, ancestor visitation dreams or numbers dreams are traditional. Race dreams open a window onto the private experience of race in America.
• Chapter 14 wraps up with a discussion of dream sharing, the main means by which beliefs and attitudes about dreams are transmitted from generation to generation. Examples of dream sharing occur abundantly throughout the book. The final chapter generalizes about the nature of dream sharing in black America and concludes with an assessment of the future of the African American way with dreams.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
Part 1	A Reverence for Dreams
1	Through the Porthole of Dreams	1
Part 2	The African Connection
2	Dream Is What We Do: Influences from Africa	9
Part 3	The Fabric of the Dream Heritage
3	Grandmother Will Come: Ancestor Visitation Dreams	17
4	That Bolt of Lightning: Predictive Dreams	34
5	We Got the Signs: Signs in Dreams	53
6	Blackonomics: Playing the Numbers from Dreams	62
7	I Knew You Were Gonna Say That: Deja Vu and Predictive Dreams	82
8	The Underbeat: Dreaming and Other States of Consciousness	91
9	Didn't Bother Me None: Experiences at the Edge of Dreaming	103
10	Take Me Through: Dreams and Dreamlike States in Religion	122
11	All Life Passes Through Water: Dreams in Hoodoo	139
12	Little Stirrups: Witches Riding You and Sleep Paralysis	155
Part 4	Dreams About Race
13	The Same Old Nightmare: Race in Dreams	165
Part 5	Dream Sharing and the Future
14	What My Mother Does: Dream Sharing and the Future	197
Appendix A	Index of Interviewees	221
Appendix B	Traditional African American Dream Signs	224
Appendix C	Technical Details about Policy and Numbers Gambling	229
Appendix D	Dream Books for Policy and Numbers Consulted for Chapter 6	233
Appendix E	Dream Book Authors and Publishers	235
	Notes	241
	References	279
	Index	297

Editorial Reviews

Many books about dreaming are concerned with interpretation or neurobiology, while others explore the role of dreaming in foreign cultures, both contemporary and historical, This book, however, is the first to examine the role of dreams in any American subculture-and the one it considers is especially vital. Shafton ("Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams") interviewed approximately 115 African Americans, ranging from highly educated professionals to ghetto children to prisoners, asking about their own and their families' experiences with dreams. What emerges is a fascinating look at instances of ancestor visitation, predictive dreaming, and the continuity of dreaming and dreamlike states. While these phenomena occur in other American communities as well (although less frequently, according to the author), other phenomena seem to be the exclusive province of African Americans. These include the special place of dream symbolism in betting, the view of the deja vu experience as caused by unremembered dreams, dreams in Hoodoo (the Southern U.S. version of Voodoo or Santeria), and dream interpretation based on a single central image rather than on a narrative. This book goes beyond dreaming, offering insights into African American culture as a whole. It is especially useful in showing us that cultural differences indeed exist, cutting across class boundaries. Essential for all academic and larger public libraries. —Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L, Pullman, WA ("Library Journal", 11/1/01)

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