Other Than the Interpretation of Dreams: The Dane-Zaa Indians and the Vision Quest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract / Resume The Dane-zaa vision quest, as viewed through the legend of Swan, who originally set the world right, and vision quest narratives, demonstrates a uniquely Dane-zaa concept of dreams. Specifically, the Dane-zaa example suggests two important points: First, that Indigenous dreaming practices must necessarily be analyzed according to locally generated values and beliefs; secondly, that the human ability to dream-as well as acquire visions-may be controlled by the individual for the sake of obtaining vital knowledge about one's environment. La recherche de la vision des Dane-zaa, telle que comprise dans Ia legende du Cygne qui a originellement « redresse le monde », et les recits de recherche de la vision, demontre le concept unique des reves chez les Dane-zaa. En particulier, leur exemple souligne deux elements importants : premierement, les pratiques de reve des Autochtones doivent etre analysees en fonction des valeurs et des croyances locales; deuxiemement, la capacite de rever et d'avoir des visions peut etre « controlee » par la personne afin d'obtenir des connaissances vitales sur son propre environnement. all dream, Lee Irwin proclaims at the beginning of The Dream seekers.1 But why do we dream? Although dreaming may be an activity in which we all share as human beings, its purpose is not as apparent as our other natural tendencies, such as sex, eating, fighting, socializing, and so on. Whereas other natural behaviors can be explained in terms of our survival capacities as a species, dreaming at first glance seems more like a luxury. Dreaming is something that we do when we have the time to sleep in or while away an afternoon. In other words, dreaming is like playing, something to be done when the demands of real life allow for it. Although dreaming may be a spontaneous act of the unconscious, deliberately talking about our dreams and analyzing them for meaning, let alone turning to our dreams for guidance or therapy, is a whole different matter. Most of us are not bourgeois Viennese women, like the infamous Dora who went to see Sigmund Freud. We may think that we have more practical things to do with our time. Yet, if thinking about dreams is merely a pastime, then why have so many different cultures taken their dreams so seriously, not just in so-called prehistoric times but even today? More important, what is there to gain from intentionally seeking out intense dream experiences at the possible expense of one's safety and health, such as occurs during a vision quest? The answer to these questions, however grounded they may be in any fully developed culture-such as the one we will turn to below-are going to run against generations of dream critiques. Western intellectuals for the most part have treated dreams disparagingly as superficial, meaningless, and even spurious functions of the mind. People in Western culture, moreover, as Robin Ridington states in Trail to Heaven, assume that we can know and experience events only after they have begun to take place in a physical world accessible to our senses.2 Consequently, Aristotle, for example, in his short work titled De Somniis, thought that dreams were the consequences of leftover stimuli from our waking life, which the mind randomly assembles while we sleep into episodes that seem relevant to our lives only because they were created out of the residue of familiar things.3 Rene Descartes, of course, dismissed dreams altogether as being even more unreliable than the senses. In Part Four of The Discourse on Method, Descartes recounts excitedly the results of his technique of radical doubt. Upon recognizing that all men regularly make mistakes in their line of reasoning-to which Descartes realized he is no less prone-Descartes also recognized that the senses in general are much more susceptible to making errors in judgment. Lastly, Descartes concluded, considering that the very thoughts we have while awake may also occur while we sleep without any of them being at that time true, I resolved to pretend that all the things that have ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".