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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]