Dream-singers: The African American Way with Dreams

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable Contribution
Review: Anthony Shafton has created an ambitious and noteworthy contribution to the literature of African American belief systems with his title, "Dream-singers: The African American Way with Dreams." Through numerous interviews and in-depth research Shafton opens the veil to reveal the unique quality of African and African American dreaming. Shafton goes further to create a clear picture of how African and by extension, African American dreams are distinctive from the way other cultures dream. "Dream-singers" gives voice to the practices of our ancestors--practices that heretofore have gone largely undocumented. "Dream-singers" situates dreams in the real world of our community, showing how they mirror our spiritual world view. Hats off to Anthony Shafton for "Dream-singers: The African American Way with Dreams." This book enhances the understanding of dreams in general and the spell dreams hold on the African American community in particular. "Dream-singers" is a useful work of nonfiction for people from a variety of fields and backgrounds; enriching conversation and point of view for all. Therapists, nurses, doulas and other support personnel will find that this book creates an especially clear window through which they can understand the unique ways dreams shape the perspective, fears, hopes and vision of many people of African descent. Highly recommended to those who work with dreams.

Rating:
Summary: Dream-Singers
Review: As a long time dream recorder and enthusiast, I found the book fascinating because it provided me with a different model for thinking about dreams besides the mainstream, psychological approach. It also gave me additional insight into my own grandparents who came from Poland and had similar takes on dreams. One was herself known for having predictive dreams.

As a white American, reading it has given me some insight that I didn't have before into black culture. I don't think I quite conceived before the extent to which there is a separate culture which deserves to be addressed and respected on its own merits. Nor the extent to which black people are really a part of two cultures which are sometimes in conflict. I feel much more at ease interacting with the black people in my environment and more free to address racial issues and compare experiences.

I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic of dreams, but more particularly to white people who want to bridge the social gap between the races which stubbornly persists.

Rating:
Summary: Dream-Singers
Review: As a long time dream recorder and enthusiast, I found the book fascinating because it provided me with a different model for thinking about dreams besides the mainstream, psychological approach. It also gave me additional insight into my own grandparents who came from Poland and had similar takes on dreams. One was herself known for having predictive dreams.

As a white American, reading it has given me some insight that I didn't have before into black culture. I don't think I quite conceived before the extent to which there is a separate culture which deserves to be addressed and respected on its own merits. Nor the extent to which black people are really a part of two cultures which are sometimes in conflict. I feel much more at ease interacting with the black people in my environment and more free to address racial issues and compare experiences.

I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic of dreams, but more particularly to white people who want to bridge the social gap between the races which stubbornly persists.

Rating:
Summary: A richly textured book to match a richly textured reality
Review: At a time of widespread interest in dreams and dreamwork, the African-American dream culture, for reasons good and bad, had remained completely invisible in the sea of books on the subject. The acknowledged importance of dream-themes in African-American music and in African-American literature makes it all the more puzzling that this vital and pervasive part of African-American life should have remained invisible to the scholars and practitioners of dream interpretation. Whatever the reasons for this discrepancy (which the author sifts through in his introduction), it was a yawning gap which Shafton set out to fill in this richly textured book.

Based on extensive interviews with 115 subjects ranging from highly educated professionals to ghetto children to prisoners, the author examines closely the full spectrum of dream experiences and their uses in personal, interpersonal and social contexts. This includes the prevalence of ancestor dreams, various forms of predictive dreaming ranging from the mundane to the sublime, the cultivation of dreamlike experiences in the waking state, dreaming as spiritual experience, dreaming as processing of socio-political reality, the nature of dream sharing in black America and the transgenerational transmission of beliefs, attitudes and interpretive techniques, the role of dream sharing as survival mechanism. Last but not least, running through the whole book, we find a subtle examination of the question of the African roots of this cultural form.

Throughout, the book makes room for the variety of cognitive and emotional experience, what the author describes as "the 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..." all operating on the fundamental assumption that dreams matter. This adds credibility to one of the book's ambitions, namely to assess the future of the African-American way with dreams.

`Dreamsingers' is one of those rare cases where a book's promises seem modest by comparison with the final experience. This reflects in part the intrinsic richness of the materials the author was able to draw upon: yet Shafton's carefully conducted research could not have produced so satisfying a book without the reality of a vital dream culture and the variety of individual lives connected through that culture. Equally important, however, is Shafton's ability to elicit his interlocutors' trust, to become transparent to their individual voices, to allow for the development of the full spectrum of attitudes towards dreams and the use of dreams in the conduct of daily lives.

One effect is that the reader is in no doubt that (s)he is looking at a clearly African-American phenomenon, one that cuts across class, education and generational boundaries. Yet we are never presented with a stereotypical `African-American' voice/experience. The diversity and nuances of viewpoint revealed in this book are as vital to the whole picture as are the core beliefs and attitudes.

It is a further attraction of the book that neither the thoroughness of the research nor the complexity of the analysis are allowed to interfere with the intensely personal quality of the material being examined. We are listening to an extended, richly textured and subtle conversation between the author and his interviewees, and , indirectly, among the interviewees themselves.

By the same token, the thoroughness and intelligence of the author's analyses should make it possible for members of other groups to look at their own cultural traditions in the light of the African-American way with dreams, having been provided keys for truly multicultural understanding.

Rating:
Summary: A richly textured book to match a richly textured reality
Review: At a time of widespread interest in dreams and dreamwork, the African-American dream culture, for reasons good and bad, had remained completely invisible in the sea of books on the subject. The acknowledged importance of dream-themes in African-American music and in African-American literature makes it all the more puzzling that this vital and pervasive part of African-American life should have remained invisible to the scholars and practitioners of dream interpretation. Whatever the reasons for this discrepancy (which the author sifts through in his introduction), it was a yawning gap which Shafton set out to fill in this richly textured book.

Based on extensive interviews with 115 subjects ranging from highly educated professionals to ghetto children to prisoners, the author examines closely the full spectrum of dream experiences and their uses in personal, interpersonal and social contexts. This includes the prevalence of ancestor dreams, various forms of predictive dreaming ranging from the mundane to the sublime, the cultivation of dreamlike experiences in the waking state, dreaming as spiritual experience, dreaming as processing of socio-political reality, the nature of dream sharing in black America and the transgenerational transmission of beliefs, attitudes and interpretive techniques, the role of dream sharing as survival mechanism. Last but not least, running through the whole book, we find a subtle examination of the question of the African roots of this cultural form.

Throughout, the book makes room for the variety of cognitive and emotional experience, what the author describes as "the 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..." all operating on the fundamental assumption that dreams matter. This adds credibility to one of the book's ambitions, namely to assess the future of the African-American way with dreams.

'Dreamsingers' is one of those rare cases where a book's promises seem modest by comparison with the final experience. This reflects in part the intrinsic richness of the materials the author was able to draw upon: yet Shafton's carefully conducted research could not have produced so satisfying a book without the reality of a vital dream culture and the variety of individual lives connected through that culture. Equally important, however, is Shafton's ability to elicit his interlocutors' trust, to become transparent to their individual voices, to allow for the development of the full spectrum of attitudes towards dreams and the use of dreams in the conduct of daily lives.

One effect is that the reader is in no doubt that (s)he is looking at a clearly African-American phenomenon, one that cuts across class, education and generational boundaries. Yet we are never presented with a stereotypical 'African-American' voice/experience. The diversity and nuances of viewpoint revealed in this book are as vital to the whole picture as are the core beliefs and attitudes.

It is a further attraction of the book that neither the thoroughness of the research nor the complexity of the analysis are allowed to interfere with the intensely personal quality of the material being examined. We are listening to an extended, richly textured and subtle conversation between the author and his interviewees, and , indirectly, among the interviewees themselves.

By the same token, the thoroughness and intelligence of the author's analyses should make it possible for members of other groups to look at their own cultural traditions in the light of the African-American way with dreams, having been provided keys for truly multicultural understanding.

Rating:
Summary: Dream Singers: The African American Way with Dreams
Review: This book is a fine combination of fieldwork and scholarship written in an informal, non-academic style. Anthony Shafton interviewed 116 African Americans, as well as a control group of white people with which to compare attitudes toward dreams. He also searched African American poetry and fiction and the scientific literature of dream analysis, and the depth of his research is revealed in the copious notes and lengthy bibliography. As a reader raised in the white community, I found much that I had experienced myself, such as dream visits from deceased family and friends, recurring dreams, and sleep paralysis-and some that I had never experienced, such as religious conversion and deriving numbers for gambling from dreams. This book indeed taught me that the dreams of black people and white people aren't necessarily different, but they think about them differently. Because my own research is on African American hoodoo practice, I found the section on Dreams and Hoodoo and the appendices on Traditional African American Dream Signs, Policy and Numbers Gambling, and Dream Book Authors and Publishers to be among the most valuable and interesting parts of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Dream-singers: The African American Way with Dreams
Review: This book is amazing. More than 100 African Americans, famous and ordinary people, share their dreams and the significance these dreams play in their lives. The author weaves a mystical thread, so compelling, I didn't want it to end. This book is a spiritual must read!