Dream Travelers is a collection of essays focusing on Western Pacific societies that weaves together new theoretical insights and richly detailed ethnographic analyses on dreams as travels. The result is a fascinating and impressively coherent volume. Recognizing that dreams in most societies are considered to represent actual travels of the human soul across temporal, spatial, and spiritual planes, the contributors take as their starting point questions about the social/political, cosmological/religious, and personal/psychological consequences of this assumption in eleven societies scattered across Melanesia, Aboriginal Australia, and Indonesia. Lohmann's introduction provides an informative historical overview of the social science literature on dreams, and then confronts methodological and epistemological problems that have long-stymied those whose interests in dreams are more cultural than psychoanalytical. These problems stem from the widely accepted notion that dreams are more problematic than other kinds of experiences because they are personal/private/internal and can only be made social/public through narrative. Dreams, so it goes, can only be known in a limited, biased, and filtered way. But, as Kracke reminds us in his Afterword, the inability to directly share experience or verify their content is not a unique feature of dreams, but extends to all sorts of social and cultural phenomena. More importantly for the volume's authors, these assumptions a bias in anthropological thinking about dreams as mere (often bizarre) imaginings of the individual, rather than as actual travel experiences that are fundamentally important to social, political, and religious life.

Taking seriously local beliefs about the ontological reality of dream travel experiences, while contextualizing the production of dream narratives—especially the role of the anthropologist in this process (Kempf and Hermann, Hollan)—the authors examine several topics: local dream theories (Kempf and Hermann, Poirier, Goodale); dream narratives and other modes of dream sharing and reporting (Robbins, Keen, Hollan, Lohmann, Tonkinson); local modes of dream interpretation such as deciphering signs and portents, and deciding on literal versus metaphorical interpretations (Stewart and Strathern, Poirier, Hollan); and the creatively transformative, sometimes political uses to which dreams are put (Robbins, Tonkinson, Keen, Hollan, Lohmann).

In all of the societies examined here, dreams are central to religious life and are valued for their role in mediating and connecting the human, non-human, and ancestral worlds (Tonkinson, Poirier, Keen, Goodale). It is through dreams that the spirit beings posited by religions—whether local ancestors and nature spirits, or introduced supernaturals such as the Christian God and Satan—become most real for people in immediate experience (Stewart and Strathern, Tonkinson, Lohmann). Another theme running through this volume is the revelatory power of dreams. Dreams may reveal culturally valuable new or previously hidden knowledge about the past, present, and future (Stewart and Strathern, Goodale), about ritual formulas and objects (Tonkinson, Poirier, Keen), and about local/global spaces, places, and relationships (Kempf and Hermann). People may then pursue or otherwise act upon these revelations in their waking life. Furthermore, such knowledge is especially potent because it derives from and is invested with the power and legitimacy of the spirit world (Robbins, Tonkinson, Lohmann).

This cursory overview cannot do justice to the array of themes so skillfully addressed by the contributors, including emotion in dreams, dreams and life-cycle transformations, dreams in processes of Christianization and colonialism, cultural theories and typologies of dreams, and ethnographic representations and analyses of dream narratives. Two especially noteworthy contributions to anthropology here are Poirier's proposed five-point methodology for studying dreams and dreaming, aspects of which are found in all of the essays, and Lohmann's theoretical model of dreams in relation to other modes of perception and cognition. Lohmann challenges us to consider dreams as part of a continuum of consciousness, rather than locating them on a polarized spectrum of “regular” versus “altered” states of consciousness.

Dream Travelers is clearly written, well-organized, theoretically persuasive, and a pleasure to read. I turned the last page feeling as if I understood dreams in ways that make sense to their dreamers, not just to anthropologists. I highly recommend this collection as essential reading for those with an interest in dreams, religious experience, social organization and relationships, and psychology in Oceania and beyond.