Climbing a stairway to heaven: Rereading dream texts as lived religion and embedded emotion in seventeenth-century New England

You are invited to the Pre-Modern Cluster’s second brown bag lunch of this year.
It is based on Prof. Plane’s newly published book:

Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England:
Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century

From angels to demonic specters, astonishing visions to devilish terrors, dreams inspired,
challenged, and soothed the men and women of seventeenth-century New England. English
colonists considered dreams to be fraught messages sent by nature, God, or the Devil; Indians
of the region often welcomed dreams as events of tremendous significance. Whether the
inspirational vision of an Indian sachem or the nightmare of a Boston magistrate, dreams were
treated with respect and care by individuals and their communities. Dreams offered entry to
“invisible worlds” that contained vital knowledge not accessible by other means and were
viewed as an important source of guidance in the face of war, displacement, shifts in religious
thought, and intercultural conflict.

Using firsthand accounts of dreams as well as evolving social interpretations of them, Dreams
and the Invisible World in Colonial New England explores these little-known aspects of colonial
life as a key part of intercultural contact. With themes touching on race, gender, emotions, and
interior life, this book reveals the nighttime visions of both colonists and Indians. Ann Marie
Plane examines beliefs about faith, providence, power, and the unpredictability of daily life to
interpret both the dreams themselves and the act of dream reporting. Through keen analysis
of the spiritual and cosmological elements of the early modern world, Plane fills in a critical
dimension of the emotional and psychological experience of colonialism.

Ann Marie Plane is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is
a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los
Angeles. She is coeditor of Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World,
also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

hm 11/10/14