Shopping dreams: Oneiric imagination,consumption,and identity projects among US young adults

Imagining and dreaming: Theoretical framing

Attention to imagination is foundational to consumer culture theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Singer, 1966). In its turn away from rational choice theory and its embrace of phenomenological approaches, the consumer culture field has engaged the concept of imagination both implicitly and explicitly (e.g., Campbell, 1987; Chin, 2016; d’Astous and Deschênes, 2005; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Illouz, 2009; Miller, 1998; Schau, 2000). In a recent review, Jenkins and Molesworth cite many foundational studies but argue that “interpretivist consumer research has closed off the imagination as merely ‘desire’, [and has] disabled critique in favor of a benign view of the consumer as ‘dream artist’ … and markets as providers of such pleasure” (2018: 330). We concur with their argument on two counts. First, consumer culture studies has largely overlooked dreaming as a significant site for peoples’ engagement with, and scholars’ analysis of, consumption. Second, there is little attention to the “shadow side” of consumption—or to the possibility that imaginative states, including dreaming, might be obliquely critical of consumer culture. Our introduction of dreaming as a mode of consumer consciousness addresses what Arnould and Thompson call an “intriguing issue, still in its theoretical infancy,” which “concerns the moral constitution of consumption and the nature of moral dilemmas and challenges that the commercialization of everyday life, including its most intimate moments, pose for consumers” (2005: 876). A focus on dreaming, we argue, helps us to probe these “most intimate moments” and offers clues to the moral dispositions of consumers.

Whereas Freud maintained that the relation of dreaming to waking life was one of obfuscation, new approaches from cognitive psychology, the neurosciences, and philosophy of mind trace a more direct bridge between the two states of consciousness. Dreams are now thought to be generated in the default mode network, a neural network associated with resting states, with the neural basis of self, with episodic memory, and with suppositions about the thoughts of others (Domhoff, 2018; Kahn and Hobson, 2005). Neuroscientists have recently argued that dreaming can be conceptualized as “intensified mind wandering,” or daydreaming (Domhoff, 2018). Cognitive psychologists have challenged the received notion that dreams are typically “bizarre” or “random” and have argued instead for a “continuity hypothesis” that proposes that dreams are continuous with waking concerns (Domhoff, 2018) and daily experiences (Schredl, 2003). The dreaming mind does make some use of figurative thought—as in visual metaphors, for example—but dreams are not entirely figurative any more than is waking thought. Recognizing that dreams are hyper-associative and built from memories, mental imagery, thoughts, and an engagement of the sensory and sensorimotor areas of the brain, scientists converge on the notion that dreaming is, at its core, a form of “embodied simulation” (e.g., Domhoff, 2018; Revonsuo et al., 2016).

What exactly is it that dreams simulate? In an extensive review of empirical studies, Anti Revonsuo and his associates have developed a “social simulation theory” of dreaming, arguing that dreaming evolved to provide “a simulation of human social reality, simulating the social skills, bonds, interactions and networks that we engage in our waking lives” (Revonsuo et al., 2016: 1295). Not only do nearly all of our dreams contain other characters with whom we rehearse sociality—we also actively imagine the thoughts and feelings of these other characters (Kahn and Hobson, 2005). What is missing in this theory is a recognition that sociality, in both waking and dreaming worlds, is always structured within and through culture. Anthropologists have demonstrated that dreaming engages with the specificities of cultural atmospheres, including those related to economic structures, political regimes and media ecologies (for reviews, see Sheriff, 2021a; Lohmann, 2007). ¹ We are particularly inspired by the prodigious work of psychological anthropologist Jeannette Mageo who theorizes that dreams are often generated by a dreamer’s “pain and puzzlement” with cultural models (2018: 257). Dreams “raise questions about a model,” Mageo suggests, and offer “commentaries” on aspects of public culture that are problematic for dreamers (2018: 270, 255).

We are aware of only two scholarly publications that explicitly address dreams about consumption as such. In a short piece, Valtonen (2011) considers what appears to be a very limited number of dream diaries and samples, and Marlon Xavier (2018) examines dreams collected from online dream-related fora and from his clinical practice. Focusing exclusively on dreams involving McDonald’s, Disney or malls (mostly among US Americans), Xavier argues that in the developed world, individuals and cultures are “colonized” by the “consumerist imaginary” (2018: 8–9). We find useful his observation that some dreams, at least, “offer an objective discourse, stemming from a very critical viewpoint, on both culture and the individual—a discourse that can be sarcastic, sardonic, ironic and iconoclastic” (2018: 324). We thus share with Xavier, Mageo, and other anthropologists (Mageo and Sheriff, 2021) the insight that dreaming engages a critical faculty—one that might highlight dimensions of culture that tend to be taken for granted or partially suppressed by the waking mind.

Methods and cultural context

The data reported in this essay are part of an ongoing, multi-method IRB-approved study, initiated in 2014. The first author has been teaching an undergraduate seminar in the anthropology of dreaming at a public university over the past decade. Students are taught techniques for remembering and recording dreams, thus producing a dream diary over the course of the semester. They are reassured that they may withhold dreams they feel are too personal to share, but to otherwise record in as much detail as possible any and all dreams remembered over the course of the semester, as well as to make timely notes on any associations that occur to them. Students are encouraged to select and offer dreams for class discussion. These discussions focus on cultural rather than psychological meanings. “Imagine that you are a Martian anthropologist hearing these dreams,” it is suggested to students. “What does the dream tell you about the culture, the social structure, the economy, and the historical moment in which the dreamer lives?” Students also use their own dreams to write interpretive essays that likewise focus on the ways that oneiric consciousness reflects on culture. At the conclusion of the semester students may donate their dream diaries and assignments to the study for a small amount of extra credit. The study also involves on-going interviews with students in which they are invited to speculate about the relationship between their dreams and their waking experiences, as well as to talk more generally about college life and the activities and concerns that most preoccupy them, including their engagements with new technologies and media. The dreams presented here were all donated by white college women in their early twenties, all of whom also reported on how they characterized their “socioeconomic background” and where they grew up. We focus on women to explore through dreaming the dense associations, identified by scholars, among gender, US women, and particular types of consumption activities (e.g., de Grazia, 1996; Leach, 1993; McRobbie, 2008). While our methods don’t allow us to generate statistical statements about consumption-related dreams, we nevertheless believe they are common and compose a recognizable genre that merits scrutiny.

The university is situated in a relatively wealthy New England state that is nearly 95 percent white. Within commuting distance of one of the nation’s high-tech hubs, the university draws students from throughout the state and fewer numbers from neighboring states. Small, traditional town structures are interspersed with outdoor shopping centers and malls. Most of the dreams reported here were donated by anthropology majors whose political sensibilities tend to be somewhat left of those of their peers not majoring in the liberal arts. Most undergraduates come from upper-middle and middle-class backgrounds but the institution also attracts a smaller number of working class students whose own parents did not attend college. Many students work part-time in retail and hospitality jobs, using wages to pay for entertainment, recent-model cars, or to partially offset accumulating student loan debt. As tends to be true for college students elsewhere, many of their daily hours are spent on smartphones through which they closely monitor and contribute to social media. Along with updates from members of their social networks, their iPhone screens feature targeted ads, celebrity news, political news (which they often attempt to avoid), viral memes, games, and entertainment. Students also have well-used Netflix and Amazon accounts and they watch both old and new shows and movies on a variety of screens large and small. What they observe on their screens produces a repertoire of shared references and is frequent fodder for conversation. Their prosthetic engagement with new technologies and entertainments makes their exposure to commercially driven images, tropes, and enticements more neurologically-near than for previous generations and much of this material finds its way into their dreams (Sheriff, 2017, 2019, 2021b; Sheriff and Mageo, 2019).

In the sections that follow, we discuss the dreams of three college women to illustrate some of the ways that dreaming might offer grist for scholars seeking to explore through novel means the links between consumption and the imagination. We first consider a relatively wealthy dreamer whose oneiric scenarios and her reflections on them intersect with recent discussions of postfeminist and neoliberal subjectivities. We then consider a middle-class dreamer whose recent encounter with racialized campus politics intrudes upon an oneiric shopping expedition. Finally, we consider the dreams of a working-class woman, wherein she exercises restraint in her search for second-hand treasures. Our aim here is not to articulate a commitment to a particular interpretive model, nor to foreclose alternative readings. While we are skeptical of the Freudian notion that an expert analyst can identify a single “true meaning” for any given dream, we do embrace Freud’s foundational insight that dreams are always over-determined—informed, that is, by many personal experiences, associations, and memories, as well as by the multifarious cultural currents that organize consciousness. Alternative readings are always possible. Most fundamentally, we offer the argument that the unguarded nature of dream narratives—and the way they frame implicit cultural schemas—might illuminate otherwise occluded dimensions of interiority and their links to cultures of consumption. We invite readers to take this argument as a point of departure for exploring other consumption-related dream genres; dreamers of other identities and subject positions; and alternative interpretive strategies.

Floral overalls and high heels: An upper middle-class dreamer

Through a combination of her donated dream diary and dream-analysis assignments, Erin, an upper middle-class New England native, reported three dreams in which her oneiric consciousness was taken in by objects of consumption. The first was as follows:

I have these new overalls, they are floral and made of a light cotton material, they have purple and pink color tones. I find them hanging on the backside of my closet door. I was struggling to find something to wear that day and was thrilled to discover the overalls. I remember wearing them and feeling very cool and collected. I wear them out onto campus and feel as though I stand out in them and I feel different as well as very comfortable in them. I get lots of compliments throughout the day and at the end of that day I put the overalls in my bag so that I remember to pack them for the Thanksgiving holiday.

In a class assignment, Erin was tasked with identifying oneiric ecologies, and how she might speculate, through her own recorded dreams and the associations she brought to them, about cultural materialities. “In waking life, shopping for clothes is something I find genuinely thrilling,” Erin writes; “in American culture the idea of having new things is often seen as a marker of wealth or success.” Erin’s dreams and her comments on them highlight the affective, status-motivated investments women are enjoined to make in their consumption choices as well as the imbrication of fashion and identity projects (Lurie, 1981). Yet embedded in Erin’s dream is a subtle commentary that she herself draws out through her associations. What makes the overalls perfect is that she “stands out” and “feels different” yet “very comfortable” in them. This remark points to a fashion paradox on her campus (and elsewhere): fashion, as Erin puts it, is a means of “achieving individuality,” of pursuing uniqueness in in one’s consumption choices—yet in her own community, standing out is not always, or even often, a comfortable experience. Reflecting on her dream, Erin suggests that the commercially-driven notion of individuality-through-fashion is, in her environment, typically eclipsed by the countervailing forces of both mass production a fairly rigid campus conformism:

Even if we consider ourselves a nonconformer there are still people wearing the same types of clothes. Clothing is a mass produced item and often every store is selling a different variation of the same item … Although I woke up today feeling as though I am my own independent person, when I look up I see five other girls wearing the exact same type of outfit.

Erin’s interior ambition to be her “own independent person,” “to look as though [her] life is together” and to do so through consumption-related performances is reflected in another dream:

I am walking around the basement of [a popular, local] bar. I am fanning out one and five dollar bills in my hands and am looking at the money, walking towards the bar to purchase a drink. I have on very high pink heels. I can hear the clicking of them echoing all around me. The people sitting on stools around the bar turn around and look at me. I do not look at them.

As a group, Erin’s dreams remind us of the work of scholars who discuss the ways in which advertising and popular media increasingly target young women as “the new ideal subjects of consumer culture” (Gill, 2007, 2008; McRobbie, 2008: 536). The pervasive cultural exhortations to use consumption as a means of mounting a confident, empowered femininity—what McRobbie (2008: 539) calls “commodity feminism”—are launched, they maintain, from within a neoliberal style of governmentality. Understood broadly as a set of economic policies designed to undercut social welfare structures and funnel capital to an increasingly small number of elites (Harvey, 2005), neoliberalism is also currently conceived by many scholars in a Foucauldian frame as a set of widely disseminated cultural prescriptions. These prescriptions call upon citizens to craft an independent, enterprising, competitive, entrepreneurial self—a self that is materialized through the choices one makes as a consumer-citizen. Gill (2007, 2008) and McRobbie (2008) see a convergence of such prescriptions with a new style of postfeminist femininity, which entails a highly individualist sensibility in which feminism is “simultaneously taken for granted and repudiated” (Gill, 2007: 161)—and in which young women are exhorted to cultivate an autonomous, “empowered” hyperfemininity through consumption. No longer the passive objects of men’s visual consumption, women are now portrayed as “desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so” (Gill, 2007: 151).

Erin’s own observation that high heels function “as a vehicle to achieve a sense of sexuality” is echoed by Gill, who maintains that while this function is indeed an old one, its recent and salient re-inscription in movies, television shows, and advertising gives it a “particular symbolic potency in this postfeminist moment,” a moment in which heels are “emblematic of a confident, powerful femininity” (2008: 36). ² Gill takes as a central illustration popular shows such as Sex in the City. Although now dated, Sex in the City remains prominent among Netflix offerings and Erin, in fact, references a scene from it in one of her dream analyses. Another of Erin’s dreams—in which the diva-celebrity Kim Kardashian parades around her apartment in an outfit that literally “glows”—provides another clue to the mediatized sites in which Erin is routinely exposed to postfeminist, consumption-oriented images and exhortations. Although she confessed to being a “fan” of the “millionaire fashion mogul,” whom she encountered in weekly television episodes and social media feeds, Erin lamented how “women are judged for not looking like a Kardashian,” how they are “pressured by society to wear make-up, have thin bodies and a clean polished appearance.” These implicit expectations set the stage, she believed, for situations in which “women can sometimes tear down other women.” Erin’s thoughtful critique of these dimensions of consumer culture, notably, appears only in her associations and analyses and not in the dream narratives themselves, in which she ardently performs to these expectations. In the next section, we present an example of a dream in which an oblique commentary on contemporary consumption practices is directly embedded.

Disney knobs and holiday dress-up: A coming-of-age dream

Reanne, a middle-class dreamer who grew up in a small New Hampshire town, reported the following dream in 2018:

Mom and [Gramma] and I …  went through these gift shops at the beach that reminded me of York, ME and Salem, MA [quaint main-street shopping meccas]. The first few gift shops I don’t remember well, but we were pointing out stuff and trinkets. I remember calling Mom over and telling her that I remembered that Percy Jackson [a character in a series of fantasy adventure novels] went to a Seattle beach and the dead was being raised … Then we got to the Salem-esque gift shop with Halloween and other holiday things. There were cute Winnie the Pooh retro doorknobs that Mom and I wanted and I remember thinking that the jewelry box I had had more holes than there were Winnie the Pooh character knobs. There were also Hocus Pocus-themed home items and clothes. The shop was super old walking through. There was also a back area where there were other holidays. Some random girl was looking for something and she grabbed St. Patrick’s Day cat ears. They were wire cat ears with clovers glued on them. I told her it was the wrong thing. Before that, she tried on a green jacket, spray painted her hair green and put on a green shirt and green jeans. Then I told her to look in the mirror.

In this dream, Reanne is in a “quaint” store, looking at pop-culture items that are associated with middle childhood. She looks at a diverse array of products—associated with Percy Jackson, Winnie the Pooh, and Hocus Pocus—each of which is branded, licensed, and controlled by Disney. In the merchandising world, these are known as “properties”—corporations purchase licenses to manufacture such items, which have come to characterize U.S. children’s consumer culture. Reanne describes the store as “quaint,” “super old.” For her, Hocus Pocus (a movie set in Salem, where Reanne might be shopping) is also from an earlier era. When it hit theaters in 1993, the movie was a flop but its viewing has since become an annual Halloween ritual among many millennials.

The setting of Reanne’s dream is typical of many party stores that offer seasonal decorations, toys, and costumes. Reanne moves to the back of the store where “other holidays” are represented. In this deeper part of the store, Reanne’s nostalgic, harmless browsing is interrupted by her encounter with a “random” girl who is shopping for a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration. The girl picks up a headdress that is “the wrong thing.” Earlier the shopper “tried on a green jacket, spray painted her hair green and put on a green shirt and green jeans”; this top-to-toe greenness seems to be too much. Reanne closes the account by saying “then I told her to look in the mirror.” The phrase sounds like a challenge or order, what you say to someone who needs to see themselves to understand that they look inappropriate.

Several months before she reported this dream, Reanne’s campus was roiled by a series of disturbing events related to holiday dress-up practices—events that are becoming common on US college campuses. On Cinco de Mayo, students donned faux-Mexican sombreros and ponchos, over-served themselves, and flooded the streets. Few knew that Cinco de Mayo’s history as a widespread holiday really began with an advertising campaign launched by alcoholic beverage producers. After a student of color charged a poncho-wearing partier with cultural appropriation, a cascade of events that played out in real-space and in social media spiraled into a palpable sense of crisis. Cyber threats lobbed from people far from campus as well as swastikas and other racist graffiti scrawled in campus buildings induced a feeling of terror in students of color. As administrators deliberated about how best to respond, students protested what they experienced as an absence of moral leadership. Close to the center of the storm and allied with students of color, Reanne had a crash-course in racism and political antagonism that shook her to her core. In this context, her oneiric, over-green Saint Patrick’s Day character takes on an ominous cast.

Although Reanne’s dream and an understanding of its instigating sociohistorical events offer clues to how she processed emotionally freighted episodes in her social surround, the insights to which the dream points don’t end there—precisely because the controversies surrounding consumption-associated invented traditions and their costuming practices are increasingly common across the US landscape. Over the last decade, the politics of costuming for holidays have become especially explosive on college campuses. In an analysis of college-student costuming, Mueller et al. argue that “whites contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of ‘ritual of rebellion’ in response to the seemingly restrictive social context of the post-Civil Rights era, and in a way that ultimately reinforces white dominance” (2007: 315). Blackface, “Indian” headdresses and Mexican sombreros are examples of this kind of commodified racist costuming. Indeed, recent “blackface” scandals involving middle-aged politicians point to the ways in which whites have long dressed up as racial others. In a culture where whites are enculturated in ways that leave them ill-equipped to deal with what DiAngelo (2011) terms “racial discomfort,” putting on a holiday costume can now land an “innocent” kid in a world of trouble. Typically, whites who dress in racist costumes invoke their innocence: “it didn’t mean anything” or “I didn’t know.” Reanne’s dream temporalizes and spatializes the rupturing of that putative innocence by situating the Saint Patrick’s Day shopper behind the Disney themed displays. It temporalizes in the sense that it first evokes her Disneyfied childhood and then replays her young adult encounter with racial politics by substituting a controversial dress-up holiday with an uncontroversial one. ³ The dream spatializes the rupturing of innocence in the sense that behind public celebrations and their associated consumption practices, a more fraught set of meanings is concealed. (The double meaning of “masking” suggests itself here.) Through the oblique means common to dreams, this one suggests that for Reanne, all such commodified masking is now tainted and dangerous—even when it is licensed by Disney. In late October, when the seminar students were asked about their Halloween plans, Reanne leaned back in her chair, rolled her eyes, sighed deeply, and shook her head.

Rhinestone earrings and the mink that got away: A working-class dreamer

Unlike Erin and Reanne, who characterize themselves as “upper-middle class” and “middle-class,” a dreamer whom we’ll call Roslyn describes herself as “working class.” Roslyn was a hard-working, part-time senior with a double major. She also worked for wages and commuted to campus from a rural area where she shared an apartment with her fiancé. Her post-graduate plans were focused: she sought a position in community mental health and was particularly concerned about the region’s drug addiction crisis. Although space limitations don’t allow us to engage debates about social class, we believe Roslyn’s dreams and her thoughtful comments on them do point to some of the ways in which a focus on dreaming can help to illuminate what Reay calls “the psychic landscape of social class” (2005: 219) and how ambivalence about and struggles around consumption shape that landscape.

In the following dream, Roslyn “tries on” alternative identities in a shopping dream; its contrast with Erin’s dreams is notable:

In a huge antique mall? Dark wood paneling, dusty with dim lighting. Feels like an old wealthy aunt’s house but with tons of stuff stacked up. Trying on a full mink coat (not sure why I knew it was real mink and not fake … ) and expensive wool socks (again, not sure why these were here, as antique stores don’t really tend to sell new wool socks? … ). End up putting both the coat and the socks back due to them being very expensive, move on and start looking at other stuff. Start looking at cheap antique-y jewelry. Find really big colorful rhinestone earrings, and buy them. Nick [fiancé] is waiting downstairs; this store seems to be located on the top floor of a college building; we go outside and it’s dark after hours on campus … 

Despite—or perhaps because of—the “discomfort” occasioned by the encounter with the mink coat, Roslyn doesn’t leave the college-cum-antique store empty-handed. She decides to spring for the rhinestone earrings. Even this consumption moment, Roslyn suggests, carries the burden of others’ expectations:

This clash between personal goals and expected roles seemed to be strongly hinted at in the dream, especially as it concluded with me buying cheap but gaudy looking earrings, an item that often symbolizes the imitation of wealth. This imitation of wealth might mirror my subconscious mind’s impression that I must adopt a façade of financial security so as to make individuals around me happy.

Roslyn’s dreams, we suggest, offer a deeper glimpse into the interiority underlying the ambivalent feelings and mixed emotions described in the literature on the subjectivities of upwardly-mobile, working class women. Through Roslyn’s oneiric eyes we see upper-crust neighborhoods as too perfect, conformist, lifeless, silent, sterile, surfacey—no place for unmoneyed people to live. The working class world, by contrast, is precarious: it is “chipped and peeling,” worn and dirty, littered with bottles and cigarette butts. But music and voices fill the air and offer the promise of life, of companionship. Allison Hurst, who interviewed US working-class college students on their perceptions of classed identities, might categorize this as the dream of a “Loyalist,” one who maintains a defensive allegiance to working-class roots and evinces “discomfort with bourgeois values of competitive individualism” (2010: 5). Following Walkerdine (2003: 239), however, we would suggest that Roslyn’s dreams of potential “embourgeoisement” more accurately and texturally evoke unsettled ambivalence—she tries on the mink coat, the faux jewels, and the fancy neighborhood. Herself a professional woman with working class roots, Walkerdine suggests that for some, class identity is an unfinished process that resists easy categorization. One can “consume oneself into being” a remodeled, middle-class person, yet feel adrift (2003: 247). “So much easier,” Walkerdine writes of her own betwixt and between identity, “to long for the lost place than to inhabit one that left me forever alienated from my own home and as a kind of stranger to myself” (2006: 20). It is precisely because the subjectivities associated with consumption, classed identities, and their complex psychic alterations are so hard to get at—a point made by Reay, for example (2005:914)—that Walkerdine and other scholars (Chin, 2016) pursue inner-focused, first-person narratives. We argue that an investigation of dreaming—offering, as it does an unguarded, up-close view of the affective, sensory, and cognitive underpinnings of enculturated sociality—can help in this project.

Conclusion

Taken together, these dreams provide a novel lens through which to examine the formation of subjectivity under consumer culture. As new models of dreaming would predict, they capture, with striking fidelity, the interior dimensions of waking-life consumer and classed experiences. But being cultural and reflexive, rather than simply mechanical products, they do more. Far from concealing the rogue desires of an a-cultural id, as Freud insisted, these dreams display and offer a meditation on both the desires and resistances—and their embedment in sociality—in something like the manner that Geertz (1973) famously described for culturally elaborated ritual enactments. In so doing, they sometimes pose questions and advance a commentary on the market logics that call them forth. Through this oneiric lens, we see, moreover, the ways in which dreamers ponder in their nighttime hours the shifting meanings, materialities, identity projects, and social structures of cultures of capitalism that are shot through, from top to bottom, with exhortations to consume.

Finally, we have presented here only one genre of dreams, offered by one population. We hope that other scholars of consumption will extend this topic by considering the fertile oneiric subjectivities of other dreamers in diverse (and unequal) global locations. Such analyses, we propose, would add much to the project of scrutinizing consumers’ imaginative states and their implicit and emergent moral dispositions—a project that as others have noted (Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Jenkins and Molesworth, 2018) promises to complicate, enrich, and refresh consumer culture studies.