Last night I had an interesting dream that made some connections between Harry Potter and Twilight. As do all dreams, this one mixed up aspects of different worlds in order to figure out if they should be categorized in a similar way. Here is the dream, and then I will tell you what I think it was doing
I was with the Cullens at their home, which was a huge Victorian mansion in a large city. It stood out by looking different from everything around it which was industrial and modern (exactly the reverse of the movies and books!). We were getting ready to fight a combination of the local people and their zombie army which was being ssent to destroy us. I was not one of the cahracters from Twilight but I was definitely friendly with them. In a later scene I am noticably taller than Carlisle. I have a teenage son.
I am worried that nothing is being done to protect us from this approaching horde and Carlisle assures me that we are safe. I suggest we get baseball bats and guns but he laughs and says it won’t work on zombies. Jasper comes in with a small jar of paint laughing. We notice as we look into one of the old bathrooms in the house that it is wrecked and that a faucet is twitching weirdly. I can’t figure out how this happened. It turns out that using this magic paint and some magic powers the Cullens have painted their house to look like it is a wreck, long abandoned. When I look at it from far away, I think it looked like a child painted a haunted wreck but I hope it will work to protect me and my son.
Okay, so the way to work with dreams as an anthropologist (not as a psychologist or psychiatrist or a spiritualist) is to figure out where these different images came from and why they seem to be jumbled together in this narrative by an unconscious (not subconscious) mind. I don’t like any of the work that says dreams contain archetypal images as if we all shared the same symbols (for anthropology this is an impossibility). And I don’t liker the psychological work that tries to mine dreams for their fears, perversions, repressed feelings, etc. I just don’t buy it, that dreams work that way.
I like the work of Bert O. States on dreams and dreaming: he call dreams “metaphor machines” and explains how we take the stuff that has occurred to us in the recent past and how we try to arrange it to fit things we already know and remember. That is how metaphors work, too. And it is all about our continued categorization of the world.
So, first the zombie stuff comes from endless zombie books and movies I have watched (actually for decades). I also just purchased the Jane Eyre/vampire book Jane Slayre which is part of a rethinking classics series that rewrites classic novels as horror stories. Zombies are interesting because like vampires they are undead and can’t easily fit any normal category of being. Often in the past I would have similar dreams about aliens (and I just finished teaching a course on alien movies from the 1950s and I was telling someone about it at a wedding the day before) so this is a dream structure I already have. It is always about attacks on my family or general threats. Having just spent a long wedding reception with my extended family, I can easily see why this kind of dream popped up last night.
The magical bathroom faucets I would connect with the sink in the Harry Potter 2 movie that I recently watched in which Harry comes to the Weasley’s house and sees self-washing dishes in the sink. The dream house as it is seen magically dilapidated from the outside by non-magical folk is from Harry Potter 7. I just finished listening to the recording of HP7 on my iPod. It is Harry’s house, the one his parents were killed in. Only wizards can see it as it is.
The whole dream story is also connected to the new Bree Tanner novella by Stephenie Meyer that I just finished reading (and will review in a later blog entry). So dreams can be useful when doing research because they show you what you are thinking about. I once recorded 200 dreams about Arnold Schwarzenegger that a colleague and I had while researching Arnold. But that is another story…
Twilight Anthropology 