3 results for "Literature"

Bawaajigan: stories of power

Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler,Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith
"Dreams play a powerful role in Indigenous culture, serving as warning, insight, guidance, solace, or hope. Bawaajigan - an Anishinaabemowin word for dream or vision - is a collection of powerful literary short fiction by Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. Stories about the connection between the spirit world and everyday life and the rest of the cosmos; urban-fantasy and high-fantasy worlds; alternative histories, and alternative realities; brushes with the supernatural, the prophetic, the hallucinatory, and the surreal. Among these themes we find stories ranging from the gritty, the gothic, the comedic, and the heart-wrenchingly tragic: a tale about the state of sleep-deprivation that conjures an uncertainty as to where dream ends and reality begins; the ominous tension of television static that conjures a certainty of something terrible about to happen; encounters with spirit guides, and spirit enemies; confrontations with ghosts haunting residential school hallways, and ghosts looking on from the afterlife; and with concepts based on Ouija boards, bead-dreamers, Haudenosaunee wizards, talking eagles, giant snakes, sacred white buffalo calves, spider's silk, a burnt and blood-stained diary, longings for what could-have-been, worm holes fallen through reality, poppy-induced deliriums, imaginary friends, and knowledge revealed. Unifying everything: these are stories about the strength and power of dreams."--
Exile Editions 2019 254 pages

Dream cultures: explorations in the comparative history of dreaming

David Dean Shulman,Guy G. Stroumsa
This volume presents a comparative perspective on the way dreams are reported, perceived, and interpreted in vastly different cultural milieux. In contrast to Freud's claim that all dreams share a universal language of symbols, the authors of the essays collected in this book seek to explore the unique dream-languages of distinct civilizations. Sixteen previously unpublished works by such distinguished scholars as Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, Moshe Idel, Christiano Grottanelli, and Jean-Claude Schmitt examine the literature of dreams from China, India, Meso-America, Greek and Roman antiquity, early Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Kabbala, Islam, medieval and early-modern Europe, and nineteenth-century Vienna. Taken together, they constitute an important first step toward a new understanding of the ways in which different cultures experience and conceptualize the world of dreams. --
Oxford University Press 1999 325 pages