Ethnographic considerations in the cross-cultural study of dreaming

The huge ethnographic literature on dreaming may prove useful to psychologists. Would-be students need to be aware of the peculiarities of ethnographic data and of the criteria by which ethnographers judge them in order to avoid making the sorts of errors that blemish many earlier studies of non-Western dreaming. Dream accounts are scientifically unsatisfactory because they are nonfalsifiable. Falsifiability is a fundamental principle of positivist epistemology, which denies that nonfalsifiable statements are scientifically meaningful, however important they may be in people's lives. Ethnographic fieldwork should be intensive and holistic. An ethnographer should live in a community long enough, normally a year or more, to become familiar with both the language and the daily routines. Most of the world's peoples take dreams seriously, as real experiences of important, albeit often obscure, significance. The morbidity of particular dream semblances seems more uniform across cultural lines than cultural determinism would predict.