Based on over a decade of research, this book connects dream studies to cognitive anthropology, to perspectives in the humanities on mimesis, ambiguity, and metaphor, to current dream research in psychology, and to recent work in economic and political relations. Traveling the dreamscapes of a variety of young people, Mimesis and the Dream explores their encounters with American cultures and the identities that derive from these encounters. While ethnographies typically concern shared social habits and practices, this book concerns shared aspects of subjectivity and how people represent and think about them in dreams. Each chapter grounds theory in actual cases. It will be compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines and illustrates how dreaming offers insights into twenty-first century debates and problems within these disciplines, bringing a vital theoretically eclectic approach to dream studies.

Jeannette Mageo is Professor of cultural anthropology at Washington State University.  Her work focuses on dreaming and the self, on child development, and on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Her manifold writings on dreams show that cultural models tie the most profound aspects of subjectivity to politics and public culture, inscribing relations of privileging and marginalization within the self that generate anxiety and resistances registered and negotiated in the imaginary realm.

Part I - A Mimetic Theory of the Dreams.- 1.Mimesis and Dreaming: An Introduction.- 2.Mimetic Strategies of Signification in Dreams.- Chapter 3.Mimesis in the Theater of Dreams.- 4.Mimesis Makes for Ambiguity.- Part II - Competing/Complementary Theories.- 5.Mimesis Makes the Metaphors.- 6.Nightmares, Or Threat Simulation as Mimetic Commentary.- 7.Beyond Continuity and Social Simulation.- Part III - Mimesis and American Selves.- 8.The Close Family and American Cultural Psychodynamics.- 9.Mirror-phase Cultural Psychology and American Specular Selves.- 10.Dreams, Mimesis, and Consciousness.