Dreams Within the Context of the Basotho Culture

Abstract

The phenomenon of dreams among Africans in general, and the Basotho in particular, tends to be downplayed and reduced merely as a mythical story. It then becomes difficult for many folklorists, literary critics and the general reading public to fully realize the sociocultural significance of dreams in the conscious human life. The chapter therefore intends to demystify dreams with a view to put them in their proper sociocultural and sociolinguistic perspective. The qualitative approach to the analysis of dreams will therefore be the underlying modus operandi in this research work. In a stricter sense, the Freudian approach will be applied to explicate the finer details of a dream with special reference to the Basotho cultural context. As part of the observations, dreams surface on two levels that are crucial in the life of man, namely reflections of the past, understanding the present, on one hand, and making projections for the future, on the other hand. In conclusion, we realize that dreams are a large, sophisticated, complex and complicated phenomenon that encompasses a lot of information that not many people thought about. Finally, the paper recommends that dreams are a typical human phenomenon. They are however interpreted differently from one country to another; from one society to another depending on the ontology, the epistemology and the philosophy of life of the society concerned.