At least since the publication of David Hall's seminal Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989), scholars of Puritan New England have left behind an older historiographic paradigm committed to the notion of a “disenchantment” of the world by the Protestant Reformation that the intellectual elites had brought with them from Europe. Historians have increasingly been attuned to how social and cultural realities on the ground, especially contacts between colonists and Native Americans, shaped colonial life. They have called attention to the important role popular religious beliefs, demonology, visions, prophecy, astrology, and alchemy continued to play in Puritan New England. Similarly, Ann Marie Plane argues here, the “importance of dreams never disappeared” (8) from colonial life in seventeenth-century New England, and apparently fell “within a more general European fascination with wonders and wonder lore” (26). This represented an important bridge to eighteenth-century movements of spiritual and emotional awakenings.

Plane borrows insights from modern psychoanalysis to argue that colonists' dreams performed critical “self-object” functions such as soothing, repairing, and reconciling challenging emotions. Dreams could be ascribed to certain natural or medical (i.e., humoral) causes, but they could also be attributed to preternatural (especially diabolic) or supernatural origins—as signs sent by God to indicate either divine approval or as a warning to change one's ways. The perennial problem for Puritans was, of course, that one could never be sure of a dream's significance, except when it came to Native American dreams, which were usually believed to be diabolically inspired. New Englanders' profound ambivalence toward dreams was shaped by not only their theological background in radical Protestantism but also their confrontation with a Native American dream culture. That culture was utterly different from (and less ambivalent than) their own, and came progressively to function in Native culture as an anti-colonial epistemology in the context of inter-cultural contest and conflict.

Plane's first chapter surveys attitudes toward dreams in Tudor and Stuart England, where they could be powerful and dangerous, as is attested by the example of Elizabeth Barton, who was executed for being too vocal in her criticism of King Henry VIII. But tracts such as Phillip Goodwin's Mystery of Dreams (1658) and Protestant martyrologies such as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1653) also demonstrate that Englishmen of all religious stripes seriously pondered the significance of dreams. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the important role that dreams played in Native Algonquin culture, drawing from seventeenth-century missionary tracts by Roger Williams, John Eliot, and others, as well as modern anthropological scholarship and oral traditions. Chapter 3 focuses on the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century, when New Englanders such as Michael Wigglesworth, Samuel Sewall, and Cotton Mather often accorded dreams an important role in their emotional, spiritual, and public lives, while they frequently demonized the dreams of Native American and religious dissidents, especially Quakers. Chapter 4 analyzes the role that dreams played in literary records of King Philip's War, and chapter 5 interrogates the role of gender and social position in the evaluation of dreams, especially in times of social conflict such as during the Salem witchcraft crisis. Chapter 6 examines reports of Native American dreams toward the century's end as sites of anti-colonial resistance.

A book about dreams in colonial New England cannot engage comprehensively with the long intellectual history of dreams in the Western tradition. Dreams played an important role in the early modern popular fascination with “wonder and wonder lore,” and also in the Neoplatonic tradition to which both Augustinian theology and later Hermetic philosophy were heirs. That said, Plane's well-informed, ethno-historical perspectives on dreams in Algonquin culture and her astute analyses of their inter-cultural history in colonial contact make this an original and important contribution to both early Native American studies and our understanding of the emotional and psychological experience of colonialism in seventeenth-century New England.