American Night Visions: Dream Lore, Print Transmission, and Interpretive Authority in Selected American Sources

American Night Visions: Dream Lore, Print Transmission, and Interpretive Authority in Selected American Sources presents the public summary of BAFES-R-003, a commissioned study conducted for Lucifer Heritage as an evidence base for a separate nonfiction book.

The study compares selected regional folklore collections, archival cases, commercial dream books, religious and Spiritualist print, historical newspapers and modern dream and sleep research. Its central finding is that the controlled corpus does not support one stable American dream dictionary: the authority of a dream was shaped by local practice, repetition, timing, storytelling, print transmission, religious interpretation and later psychological or scientific explanation.

The research also shows that printed and vernacular traditions interacted constantly, that archival status does not remove problems of source dependence, and that contradictions between regional, commercial, religious and scientific interpretations should be preserved rather than forced into one system.

Access: Restricted publication. The full research report is not publicly released at the commissioning client’s request. BAFES retains the research documentation and bibliographic archive of the project.