Ann Marie Plane. Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century.

Abstract

Waking from a nightmare in a cold sweat, it seems, is neither the product only of bad horror movies of the 1980s nor even an entirely modern experience. In fact, dreams and the powers they hold over the women and men trying to make sense of their respective personal lives provide revealing glimpses into both the lives of those specific people and the worlds around them. Arguing in Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century that seventeenth-century New England’s “colonialist expansion encompassed the realm of wonders,” Ann Marie Plane deftly analyzes narratives of dreams left by English colonists and indigenous peoples of the northern English mainland colonies, revealing much about their respective cosmologies and the ways they were shaping their new communities (4). Avoiding the potential morass of overly relying on theories of psychotherapy, Plane explores the world of dreaming in early New England by means of close and “sensitive reading[s]” of numerous dream reports of puritan New Englanders of various backgrounds and ethnicities, connecting them persuasively to the colonialism of the seventeenth century (5).