Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming

by David Dean Shulman (Editor)

This volume offers a comparative, cross-cultural history of dreams. The essays examine a wide range of texts concerning dreams, as culled from a rich variety of religious China, India, the Americas, classical Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, and medieval Judaism and Islam. Taken together, these pieces constitute an important first step toward a new understanding of the differences and similarities between the ways in which different cultures experience the universal yet utterly unique world of dreams.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

David Dean Shulman is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages of India. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist, and a peace activist. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India

In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. degree in Islamic History, specializing in Arabic. He gained his doctorate in Tamil and Sanskrit. Shulman is a peace activist, and member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian 'Life-in-Common' or Ta'ayush grass-roots movement for non-violence.

Reviews

[Barrita]

Esperaba que fuera mas acerca de la parte social y cultural que del analisis del sigificado de los sueños en las culturas que mencionan. Es, ademas, un libro bastante seco, por lo que me tuve que pausarlo en varias ocasiones.

Fuera del capítulo de Freud -que es poco original- la información es interesante, asi que lo dejo en dos estrellas.