Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era [Paperback]

Mechal Sobel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0691113335 | ISBN-13: 978-0691113333

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Sobel (history and American studies, Univ. of Haifa, Israel) here explores individual self-transforming experiences in America between 1740 and 1840. Mining over 200 narrative memoirs of blacks and whites, both rich and poor, as well as letters and diaries, the author found that dream interpretation was central to self-transformation, whether in revolutionary participation, religious conversion, or race and gender relations. Life-shaping events often involved dream interpretation with the use of popular manuals following millennia-old European traditions and/or African beliefs. Rich Afro-European cultural exchanges not only occurred in daily life but also through religious revivals and conversions involving mixed Quaker, Methodist, Baptist, and Shaker communities and blending practice, belief, and symbolism. Weaving together her fascinating biographical material, Sobel portrays whites' varied use of black others, blacks' channeling of reciprocal hatred, and the gender-oriented use of the other. The academic prose of the interpretative passages limits popular accessibility. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.DNigel Tappin, Lake of Bays P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (September 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691113335
• ISBN-13: 978-0691113333
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,430,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, April 19, 2002

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Teach Me Dreams (Hardcover)

This is a difficult book. People will find it repetitive and others will find it narrowily sourced. Yet the book offers an important account of a change of transcendent importance. People have often talked about the rise of modern individualism in the prologue and aftermath of the American revolution. Sobel, however, offers a much more radical thesis. What the years from 1740 to 1840 saw was the rise of a radical new sense of SELF. Previous our inner persona had been passive and communal. People often went through lives believing they did not have choices. But in the triumph of the American revolution and the rise of a new market society, the self became ostentatiously active and individualist. The very concept that we use to see ourselves is a relatively recent invention. (pp. 3-7) Sobel's specific contribution is to examine dreams. Recent research on dreams suggests that elements of dream correlate with the amount that one is individualist. Studies of dreams in Nazi Germany suggest that people started supported the Nazis in their dreams before they supported them consciously. (p. 10) At the time Sobel's study begins dreams were of particular importance to people as signs or portents, though by the end of our period they were viewed as comparatively unimportant.

The rise of the self is not the unmitigated triumph of individualist freedom. Quite the contrary, for concepts of the self are often defined in hostility, and increasingly hatred of the abstracted, reified "Other." Increasingly many whites viewed themselves in opposition to blacks. Yet at the same time blackface reflected the envy of proletarianized whites for what they saw as the laziness and abandon of African-Americans. (p. 97) Blacks in turn often viewed whites with hatred, yet had to keep their opinions to themselves for fear of violent retaliation. Meanwhile men faced the struggles of increasing dependence by emphasizing their own individuality while idealizing women and children (pp. 160-63). The costs of these idealizations was to deny women part of their sexuality (p. 225), to depoliticize them as part of the politicization of public life. At the same time men were placed in a peculiar new emotional world: on the one hand the more "emotional" style of African-Americans seeped into evangelical religious practices. On the other hand, crying, once an expected mark of masculine true emotion in the eighteenth century, was now seen as a sign of effeminate weakness (p. 142). As a consequence modernity is built upon a sense of otherness that is based on racial and gender inequality.

A very important hypothesis, with many stimulating implications. I would like to point out some demurrals. Sobel's work is based on roughly two hundred dream memoirs which, while impressive, is only a fraction of the American population. Moreover, this sample is often tilted to the minority of evangelicals and relatively small religious sects which concentrated on the production of such works. Similar problems of proportion arises from the somewhat untypical women Sobel studies who wrote down their paths to individuality. Much of Sobel's chapter on whites images of slaves deals with the even smaller minority of Quakers who were able to reject slavery and achieve a certain sense of empathy and maturity. This account does not deal so much with the many whites in the North who rarely if ever saw blacks and yet relatively little qualms in supporting slavery. Back in the sixties Orlando Patterson criticized James Baldwin in the New Left Review for failing to recognize the strong sense for many Americans that blacks are not existing, the sense of absence from their lives. (A process, of course, encouraged by segregation.) This deserves as much emphasis as the neurotic obsession about the other. More could be said about the economic and social background Still, this is an important work that clearly is deserving of more research. One wonders how E. Roger Ekirch's upcoming history of sleep will deal with this problem. We applaud our capacity for moral choice, yet its origins are afflicted with hatred.