Dreamtime
Category: Spiritual
How the word Dreamtime came about
Dreamtime is a term English speakers have used for the worldview of Aboriginal Australians. It names a primordial era in which ancestral spirits walked the land and shaped its features, its plants and animals, and the law people are to follow. And that era, the widely circulated account goes, is not an event closed off in the past but a dimension reachable through ritual, song, and one's relation to sacred places.
The word "Dreamtime" itself, however, is not a word from an Aboriginal language. It is a rendering used by Francis Gillen, the post and telegraph stationmaster at Alice Springs who also left ethnographic records, in a report of 1896, and taken up by his collaborator Walter Baldwin Spencer. In their 1899 book Native Tribes of Central Australia the two glossed the Arrernte word Alcheringa as "the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal," and in later writing they rendered it as "dream times." That rendering has been criticized: from the side of linguistics it has been pointed out that it leans on an etymological link with alchera (dream) which holds only over a limited geographical range, and that it does not capture the center of the original meaning. Aboriginal Australians comprise many language groups, and both the names used and the content told differ by region, so this is not something that can be gathered into one unified doctrine. That point is worth settling first.
Stories told as song paths tied to the land
Dreamtime stories are told as "songlines," song paths tied to the land. Routes the ancestral spirits are said to have traveled became sacred ways, and singing along those routes has been explained as a duty owed to country. Ethnographic accounts report that such songs work as cues for recalling routes and the location of water, and at the same time form a means of handing on to the next generation how the land is to be treated and which rules must be kept.
One reason the term became widely known in English is Bruce Chatwin's travel book The Songlines (1987). That book, though, was written from a visitor's side; it is not an explanation given by the people themselves. For songs belonging to country, who may tell them is in some cases set down, and the accounts open to outsiders are only a portion of the whole. So rather than supposing that the whole has been grasped as a system, it is closer to the truth to assume that what can be seen from outside is limited.
The question of where dreaming and waking are divided
In modern Western scholarship it has been a premise to divide experience while awake as reality and dreams as unreality. Against that, accounts of Aboriginal worldviews return again and again to the point that what is experienced in a dream is also handled as an event continuous with land and law. What is worth reading here is not deciding which side is the real one, but that the premise of where experience is cut apart differs from culture to culture.
Writing that overlays this subject with a separate framework such as Jung's collective unconscious does appear, but the two arose differently and rest on different grounds, and neither backs up the other. Arguing a link with physics debates over observation has no grounds at all. Studying dreams as brain activity and handling dreams within a relation to land and community are looking at the same object from different questions; they are not something one has to choose between.
Noting the place in your dream journal
From here on, this is not an introduction to Aboriginal teaching but our own position on how meeting this way of thinking can widen the way you look at your dreams. Borrowing elements of ritual and sacred place while cutting them out of their cultural context has been criticized as cultural appropriation. What we borrow is held to one perspective: not letting a dream close inside one person's head, but looking at it within a relation to place.
The concrete cue is to note the place in your dream journal. Where you were in the dream, where you were actually sleeping at the time, and whether the dream came while traveling or at home. Adding just those three as one line each changes what you can notice when you look back later. Cues such as the same theme recurring in dreams had at one particular place, or the setting of your dreams swapping over before and after a move, cannot be picked up when only content is written down. The other cue is to stop treating the dream as a problem to be solved and take the time to stand in that place once more. Writing out what you saw there, what you heard, and how the ground felt while recalling the scene in the dream can bring up what the dream was handling before you hurry to assign it a meaning.
Was this article helpful?