Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
One day in 1698, Robert Pyle of Pennsylvania decided to buy a black slave. The next night he dreamed of a steep ladder to heaven that he felt he could not climb because he carried a black pot. In the dream, a man told him the ladder was the light of Jesus Christ and would bear any whose faith held strong; otherwise, the climber would fall. Pyle woke that morning positive that he should eschew slaves and slavery, having equated the pot with the slave he wished to buy. In fact, so acutely did this dream awaken him to his sins that he became a dynamic advocate of liberation. This dream literally changed his outlook and his life. Teach Me Dreams delves into the dream world of ordinary Americans and finds that as their self-perception increased, transforming them on a personal level, so did a revolutionary spirit that wrought momentous political changes. Mechal Sobel considers dreams recorded in the life narratives of 100 people, revealing the America of the Revolutionary Era to have been a truly dream-infused culture in which analysis of dreams was encouraged, and subsequent personal reevaluation was striking. Sobel uses a wealth of information--letters, diaries, and over 200 published autobiographies from a wide range of "ordinary" people; black, white, male, female. In these accounts, many previously neglected by historians, dreamers explain how their nighttime adventures opened their eyes to aspects of themselves, or unveiled new paths they should take both personally and politically. Such paths often led them to challenge those in power. Charting the widely dreamed of opposition between blacks and whites, men and women, Sobel offers astounding new insights into how early Americans understood their lives. Her analysis of the dreams and lives of ordinary Revolutionary-Era people demonstrates links between dreaming, self reevaluation, and participation in the radically changing politics of the time. This book will appeal to specialists in the fields of American and African-American history, and anyone interested in dreams and self-development.
Amazon.com Review
The theme of this study is encapsulated in the startling cover illustration, an 18th-century folk painting of a white Virginian embracing a black woman while another thrashes a black man with a stick. Mechal Sobel, history professor at the University of Haifa, analyzes 200 letters, diaries, and autobiographies from the America of 1740 to 1840, more than half of which describe dreams and visions. Observing that "Today the acceptance of an inner consciousness of self is so widely taken for granted that it is hard to realize how modern this development is," Sobel sees in the dreams a progression from passive to active, and he places the awakening of individual self-awareness during this period. The impetus for this development she attributes to "opposition to an enemy other." Blacks and whites regarded each other as alien, the "enemy other," a concept reinforced by friction between men and women as they struggled with rigid gender expectations. The raw sociological material given is fascinating, the background well drawn, the statistics enlightening: for example, of the 2.6 million population of the Colonies in 1774, half a million were black. The material is viewed through a narrow lens, however, with all social conflicts given either a racial or gender-oriented interpretation. Dreams are prominent in the native cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Australia. One of the contributions of this study is the recognition that Anglo-Americans also turned to them for an understanding of their lives. Teach Me Dreams is an original and valuable addition to the rich literature on both history and dream analysis. --John Stevenson
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