For a long time it was assumed by some that the inner lives of so-called primitive people were less rich than those of their “civilized” overlords. This fallacy was exposed in the 1920s when the British physician and ethnologist Charles Seligman began collecting the dreams of both colonizer and colonized. Seligman and his team of researchers, who were stretched out across the British Empire, found that the dreams of those “primitive people” were very much like those of an average European. “Dreams of flying were a favorable omen from Indonesia to Austria,” Matthew Parker writes. “If raw meat appeared, this was a prophecy of impending death or bad luck for Irishmen, Solomon Islanders and West Africans alike.”
However, as Parker also points out in One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, there was one significant difference: the major part played by white officials in the dreams of the colonized, almost all of them within “the context of humiliation, reproach or violence.” In one dream, a Ugandan man dreamed of “being given ten strokes with the cane by the District Commissioner.” In another dream, also reported in Uganda, a young man dreamed he was a child again and that the local missionary abducted him and threw him into a deep hole, where he died. “Whatever the particular imperial situation,” Parker writes, “or the status of the dreamer within it, colonized minds were anxious, even damaged.”
