The use of dreams in the Varkan religious tradition and in other religious traditions in India constitute a kind of historiography, a way of recalling the past that is authoritative, grounded in evidence, and linked to a reputable “author,” or the receiver of the dream. India in the Orientalist imagination has long been a place of dreams and a place situated in the dreams of the West. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel famously referred to India as a woman peacefully dreaming after giving birth. Contemporary travel guides to India still refer to the country as a land of dreamy mystery. 

Dr. Novetzke shows that, at least in one case, an Indian understanding of dreams is something more akin to a paranormal archive than to an occidental fantasy. Here the past has a medium of that sidesteps the usual course: the technologies of writing, the economics of textual preservation, and the professional intervention of the historian. It is a transmission even beyond language to a realm of bodily and mental experience. This study of dreams is part of an exploration of historiography in religious traditions in India.