Cultural Semantics of Signs-Symbols in Texts of Folk Dreams (On the Material of the T radition of Dreaming in Perm Prikamye)

The article observes the specificity of folk traditions of dreaming as a cultural and symbolic system that is reflected in the language. It describes the peculiarities of the symbolic space of religiousness based on superstitions and magic as part of Russian folk culture on the material of folk texts of dreams recorded in Prikamye at the beginning of the 21st century. The article seeks to reveal the connection between symbols referring to dreaming in Perm regional tradition and in other cultural dialect zones (the Volga region and the North of Russia), in other Slavic cultures. Drawing on the experience of the domestic ethno-linguistic description of the tradition of dreaming and the explanation of dreams, the authors examine the cultural sense of symbolic forms in their broad cultural and linguistic context, in close connection with the evaluation of the prognosis that a dream contains, and in the interaction of different symbols of one conceptual focus. The chosen approach allowed revealing a variety of sources of symbolic words in the tales of dreams-predictions (traditional cults and beliefs, Orthodoxy and Old Believers), discussing the associative and semantic potential of symbolic words, showing the linkage of their cultural semantics to the type of religious, superstitious mystic, and existential discourse. The article investigates the use of dreams as a way of a cathartic liberation from negative emotions, as a way to express and clarify believers’ religious ideas and system of values, as a didactic myth, as a way to realize one’s personal existential experience (destiny, course of life, turning points). In stories about dreams, the interaction is established of symbolic words that originate from different cultural codes - elements, animals, plants, colours; anthropomorphic, demonogical and religious worlds. The article notes a peculiar function of symbolic words that perform the role of keywords and supporting fragments in the text of a dream and express the main sense and emotions. Their repetitions in different regions and their existence in folklore show that the main symbolic units refer to collective folk mythological and religious tradition, not to individual creation of symbols. This conventional and symbolic language of dreaming as an unconscious creative activity may be regarded as a way of cultural conceptualization of eternal values rather than as a conventional way of revealing one’s certain personal problems.

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