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Dreamtime 1
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to be continued in Dreamtime 2 |
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Introduction"Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of
people on Earth - dating back - by some estimates - 65,000 years. Dreamtime is
Aboriginal Religion and Culture. "This is Wandjina - the God who made the Earth and Sea and
everything else. |
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The next succession of dreams presents some walkabout in a mindscape.
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Dream 1
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I especially need a set of iron hooks to connect the side-planks with the front and the foot of the bed. This is a roughly bended piece of hammered iron, with a black patina, as if it came out of an excavation on an archeological site. There are two holes in the thick front part, corresponding with openings in the long tailed slender back of the piece. The holes are meant for screws, but far too small. Some filing will be necessary. |
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In front of me I find two floors, with plastic curtains in front to hold the dust inside. People inside look like powdered with sawdust, but far in the past. Cobwebs hang down from the ceiling and the hats of the men as if it were a phantom castle there, and everything boxed up with machinery and wood. |
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I lost my way in this haunted house, searching for the exit. I know they are going to build a new kitchen there, and then find a big hall as empty as can be. Even the floor is broken away, showing the sand underneath, and it is there the kitchen will be installed. |
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I enter the living room, which is as small as the kitchen should have been in an old fashioned country house, with a Leuven stove burning and a table with chairs and a sort of washing-up bowl next to the curtained window. An old man stumbles forward, almost falling. He is the boss of the business, old and gray, but living and well. It leaves me with a feeling of paradox, just like the tiny living room seems to vanish next to the immense future kitchen. There is an old lady too, and children. A strange royal chamber of termites, with an old queen and all the rest of it to rule the tribe. |
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I continue to find my way out, and walk along the beach. It is a wild looking part of the world, with dark people walking about in loincloths. They look as small as mice, and I feel like a giant. Now I see the contours of the island, the place where we are at the moment. If I walked the other side on, I had to go around the whole border of the island, instead of the few miles in the right direction. |
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I arrive at the inner court of the woodworking shop, now a sort of block with tens of window holes, showing the nosy heads of gray haired old folks. Right in front of me I see the door to get out now. The people accompanying me go through the gate, but by the time I arrive, together with a rose dressed young girl, the opening in the wall has narrowed and no more than a toe goes through. Stuck again, and I wake up. |
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Dream 2
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In the corridor two teenage boys are having a romp, and the smallest one hits the tallest on the face. A fight is in the air, and I stop them, reprimanding the oldest of the two. "If you don't stop, I'll knock you out", I say, but in fact I am not so sure to be a match for the burly fellow. The lady smiles and agrees with me, and then I see she is wrinkled and old, just like a shriveled nun. The bed is not inviting any more. |
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Then I walk to the academy of gemology in Antwerp, and a new school year is just starting. There are lost of new students, all older man, and the teacher, a prissy woman, asks me why I did not get my diploma some years ago, arguing I passed the exams but did not finish my thesis. I am very embarrassed with her questioning and promise to explain things later. |
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For one reason or the other I begin with the newcomers and have a sort of student's card, a trashy piece of paper in a shabby plastic cover, brittle and torn up. From now on there are three school years instead of two, and there are thirty students, much more than when I began a few years ago. Again a very embarrassing situation. |
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We go home with the bus, but then I remember my appointment with people of the university. It is too late, and in the meanwhile the vehicle meets a roadblock and has to drive in a tunnel. Then I am on my own, sliding over the wet clay floor, deeper and deeper in full speed. I hope to have enough momentum to slide up again, but everything stops on the bottom of the pit : a long deep slit in the ground, with sidewalls in a pink-orange sort of marble. I get aware of the fact that I am dreaming and try to control the course it, outward, but it does not work. Shit, I got stuck again, and pop up into being awake. |
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Dream 3
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She washes my face with a sort of whitish soap and winds a black frayed wrapper around my head and the head-rest. The soap prevents the wrapper to stick to my face. She urges me to go to the toilet before she starts, and I go away, meeting a teacher there who asks me things.
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Back into the room of the dentist, she asks me to have a look at her heating system, because she gets electric shocks on touching the iron pipes. Half of the windowsill has been broken away by somebody, looking for the cause of the electricity leak, but obviously it did not yield anything. |
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There is an old greenish lean-to over the front door, covered with wet deposit containing several weathered electric wires. I guess the cause of the leak has to be located there, but I can't prove it without touching the roof, standing on my bare feet. I don't like to be the subject of electrocution, so I ask for a neon screwdriver. They have none of them, and I am astonished and wake up. |
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Dream 4
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Dream 5
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My bike is in the grocery, where I ordered a bottle of some pop. A pallet of the stuff blocks off the way to my bike, and I have a big struggle to drag it out. I don't like to take the soft drink any more, but a case of empty bottles hangs off my handlebars. The grocer takes the bottles out of the case, holding them between his fingers, and I drive on with the remnants of the case, being a sort of thick whitish cardboard. |
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In the small streets full of people I try to hurry up, but nothing seems to succeed. At the end of the road, there is a crossing street, just covered with a layer of black mud. Because some other people rode through, I can follow the tracks. At the end my wife gets stuck, and somebody wants to help, pushing her, but a windowpane in between makes it impossible. Now the whole dream revolves around being blocked off and having no more time, and I wake up. |
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Dream Time
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A quote form William Lambe: ... For a few seconds I seemed to lose the white ability to live in the
present and think about the future ... I suddenly knew that the group on Ah
Fong’s veranda were part of an ever present past ... They would not predict or
discuss the future ... They lived entirely in the dreamtime
of the Abunda and talked only of the present. There is a great gulf between
those who live in the present, thinking about the future ... And those who live
in the past, thinking about the present. |
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Something about Aborigine History (Ref. 26)
Walkabout (Going or Gone Walkabout) |
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Quote from "Aborigine Myths ... ", by Peter Holden (Ref. 28) Anangu believe that the bodies of Tjukurpa men and women were often transformed into isolated boulders or piles of rock. The places became sacred, and Aborigines born near a sacred site automatically became members of that particular dream ancestor's clan or totem. The journeys undertaken by the Tjukurpa ancestors are perpetually relived through stories and songs. And sites of special importance along the paths they traveled are often named to retain special significance.
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Quote form "The universe of the Aborigine", by David Jensen (Ref. 29) Totemism is how the Aborigines classified man, natural phenomena, and living organisms in one unified system. A totem was anything in nature that an Aborigine associates with and worships. A totem was not necessarily restricted to an individual. Many could share and did share certain totems. As Elkin states it, "Totemism is a means of expressing the unity of man and nature as one big tribe."(207) Since the Aborigines could not adequately respect every single aspect of nature, they divided up their worship by means of their totems. The classifications of totems were: 1) individual, 2) sex, or gender, 3) moiety, which partitioned the tribe in half, 4) section and subsection, which dealt with groups within a tribe, 5) clan, or immediate family, 6) local, which was based on a specific location, 7) and multiple in which a number of natural things were associated to a group. With such classifications and divisions the Aborigines could adequately respect and worship the entire natural world. Totems allowed the Aborigines to cooperate with their environment and provided them with confidence in nature. A totem was virtually anything found in nature. This includes: plants, animals, flowers, wind, rain, storms, thunder, lightning, the stars, the sun, the moon, clouds, tools, weapons, food, cosmetics, fire, smoke, water, body parts, desires, sickness, health, animal organs, and object parts (Bernt, 226). Totems were the Aborigines "manifestation of their kinship with the natural world" and totems "unit[ed] them with nature's activities and species in a bond of mutual life-giving."(206). Totemism was the central structure of the Aboriginal world and as a result it helped form their "social groupings and mythologies, [it] inspired their rituals and linked them to the past."(Elkin, 140) |
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Quote from "Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs" by Tony Crisp (Ref. 30) If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned - if still untraumatised - sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images. So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished. |
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Dream Analysis
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As long as we are not able to build a human mind out of scratch, with biological or electronical spare parts for example, or simulated adequately by means of a computer, say, to set up all thinkable experiments about thinking, we happily refer to metaphors to catch a glimpse of what we call consciousness. Earlier we took kids (dream analysis) to put in our head, playing the game there, resulting in consciousness when the leading group of them, in the right time and on the right place, takes over control over a movement or a word to be said. This leading group evolves from a collection of simple likely candidates to produce a winner through natural selection (W. Calvin) in a matter of milliseconds. Then consciousness may emerge when we become aware of the consecutive chain of such events, having the impression we wanted what we see we did, having at least the conviction of being me, or some subjective aspect of experience (Chalmers). Consciousness originates when "there is something it is like to be a conscious organism" (Nagel, quoted by Chalmers, Ref. 34). The kids being the representation of a group of cells (neurons and all assistants, coworkers and intermediate substances inclusive) standing for a symbol, being the crystallization of a consecutive series of events, time and space in the vicinity of a point so to say, in itself symbolized by any detail or element contained in the first symbol, eventually pointed to by a word or something the like. So we arrived at our Aborigines. Why the hell do they call it 'dreamtime'? Just as if they don't dream at night, or perhaps they never get awake? "So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine." (Tony Crisp, Ref 30, quoted above). It was a little bit awkward to find a sentence like that in our Collective Unconscious web, the link between ordinary dreaming and dreamtime dreaming... Therefore I took it a second time to have a better look at.
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"So people like we still (not having evolved more in the last few thousands of years than our ancestors would have done the last hundreds of thousand years) should meet the influence of the past (the whole past and nothing than the past) as actual visualized kids (persons, symbols, ... ?), rather than crunching school books about history. Simple contact with the real feelings and needs of the kids would result in a real educational experience. This is exactly what dreams are about, and in this manner the most creative and problem-solving thinking is done by ancient modern people. Therefore working with dreams, reminding closely the feelings and circumstances of the dream itself, followed by root finding free associations while awake, is very important for the human being." (John's free translation). |
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Let's pretend games of children are an other entrance into the world of dreams and dreaming dreamtime. We often played Cowboy and Indian, or Police and Burglar, or Club with Members and the Others - the Members having a secret sign of dignity and ranking. For me personally a green pigeon card, with the imprinted number corresponding with what is engraved in the ring of the bird and used to identify a lost animal, is the symbol inter symbols for my having human rights, being part of the game, belonging to the club. This staff is planted in my world at age seven when I saw my father cuddling up his doves with rings and cards, while he was looking at me in desperation because he caught me and my cousin playing doctors and nurses just before. It felt as if I was kicked out of his dovecot, lost for ever. Not like the Lost Son, provoking a huge feast on his coming back, no no, rather like the Fallen Angel, condemned to burn in hell for the rest of his days, thrown out of connection with Heaven for ever. |
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The card and the ring, prowling round in my dreams, following me in the dreamtime of reality. "Without taking his eyes off me, Bert pulled a filthy bundle of
rags from his pocket. He unwrapped them carefully and with an abrupt movement
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My father never plucked one of his beloved doves to decorate my case with down. This of course is something personal for me, but perhaps it may be generalized a little bit. First of all, a dream is always personal, and although dreamtime happens in public space visible for everybody, each of us sees it through his/her own eyes... so from the moment I say or write something, I am talking about myself. Therefore I try to identify personal aspects as clear as possible, to set off the rest by contrasting it out. Just the same way my father learnt me what it was not to have a personal talisman, by giving them to his other doves right in front of my nose. I interpret the talisman as a symbol representing an invitation to join the club, carrying the threat of sudden death if I didn't show up at the party. |
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There were initiation rites of course, and you see I hold the talisman - one for the rest of my life - in my clean hands, and there was the threat of death - deadly sins leading to eternal burning in hell - if I did not show up in a state of grace at the party, but, in spite of the party, or due to the party, nobody took it seriously. Primitive remnants out of the past, celebrated for the fun of the moment, or perhaps being a sort of social structural element, but without any magic carrying the threat of a sudden death at all. Tony Crisp, Ref. 30, and quoted above, writes something about magic without using the word : "If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned - if still untraumatised - sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races." |
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If T. Crisp had mentioned the fullness of each material object having the right size to hold or consider, with a texture and a gleam and a color and some translucence revealing its interior structure changing when held against the light or looked at in the same direction, and so on, he would have completed the picture. It reminds me of the word "eidetic", being some characteristic sort of perception related to kids. We have an other look in our collective unconscious : "Eidetic imagery--a significant proportion of children appear to have the ability to continue to perceive a visual image even after it is withdrawn from their view. That ability is called eidetic imagery. Eidetic imagery typically disappears with the advent of reading. It is also more common in preliterate peoples." (Werner, Ref. 40) "Awareness. Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught. It may be assumed on good grounds that seeing and hearing have a different quality for infants than for grownups, and that they are more esthetic and less intellectual in the first years of life. A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the "good father" comes along and feels he should "share" the experience and help his son "develop." He says: "That's a jay, and this is a sparrow." The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his "education" the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up. A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand. The recovery of this ability is called here "awareness." Physiologically awareness is eidetic perception, and allied to eidetic imagery. Perhaps there is also eidetic perception, at least in certain individuals, in the spheres of taste, smell and kinesthesia, giving us the artists in those fields: chefs, performers and dancers, whose eternal problem is to find audiences capable of appreciating their products. (R. Bouwens, Ref 41) |
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Then we go to T. Crisp (Ref. 30) again : "Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images." In the course of our long years of analytical practice, we, Lieve and I, found out that people - we inclusive - with some interest in psychoanalysis - for whatever reason - after a while loose their ability to consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions, but do so with images and by relating everything and everybody with each other, now, in the past, and everywhere every time. Dream like images, and every thinkable perception, emotions and feelings, just as dreamlike spoken and written language (because it appears in dreams as well) come up in the normal state of being awake. This awareness steadily develops when the reasoning and questioning mind encounters an analyst in contact with his/her so called unconscious and automatic system of feelings, associations, imaginations, desires and frustrations, knowing of and being physically aware of all primitive and childish bases still perfectly active in the presumed modern and developed human mind. There is a nice bridge between dreamtime and normal dreaming. When the guys go to sleep, the kids gradually awake to play pretended games, trying out every possible solution at hand to classify and make automatic (unconscious) all encountered difficulties causing conflicts between real guys, guys and things, feelings and so on, in real time itself, and referred to already classified material, our reference frame, memory, mind, emotions, the world of the kids, give it a name. When we awake, our system processed incoming data off-line, and fine-tuned our system for a perfect adaptation to the environment, if possible. Problems arise when the feedback system fails to compare the incoming value with the reference, the input going off scale. Wonderful to see how most people manage the situation by simply ignoring the referencing system, wandering about in real time - the literate world of reason - the soup of pointers to pointers, disconnected from the underlying world of symbols and primitive categorical perception. As if the cortex column interconnected upper layers of the brain, seemingly evolved to serve people-people communication, rules the whole organism in accordance with the human law, attending feedback from the lawyer, but cut off from the roots. |
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Without, at the moment, looking further at the impact of colonialism, or the reign of materialism, we try to get back at dreamtime itself, being possibly a workable model for the structure of dreaming, supposing the closer contact there might be with functional dreams. This does not mean we want to go back to the bush. From time to time we ought to walk about in the bush. |
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"Totemism (derived from the word ote in the Ojibway dialect of the Algonquian language) is a religious belief involving animal spirits that is frequently associated with shamanistic religions. As an organizing principle of religious beliefs, totemism was discredited by the noted anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and has since come to be understood as a heterogenous collection of related religious phenomena. In doing so, Lévi-Strauss summarized and criticized the theories of other anthropologists, most notably Elkin's theories in re the totemism found among Australian aborigines... " (Wikipedia, Ref. 45, at a moment in the past.) The simple fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss discredited aborigine totemism tickles me to think his totem poked somewhere in his stomach. Aborigines lived with it for more than 50000 years, so why would we throw it in the trash bucket? Totems seam to be very versatile and powerful. In one way or the other my thoughts go in the direction of the symbol construct, the throwing together of related objects, the symbol, symbolized by an element out of it, the symbol. The symbol is valid in mental spaces, dreamlike environments. Then the totem glues together a cluster of related people, the totem, identifying with a significant element in it, the totem. The totem is valid in social spaces, dreamtime surroundings. |
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Then we have something like tjurungas or churingas : Churingas (Ref. 46) :"A churinga (of Central Australia) is a very sacred object which represents
the ancestral and the individual spirit of its owner. Each tribe is divided into
totems related to animals, plants or objects, and the legends and relationship
of each totemic group are recorded on the churingas...
The symbols are explained on the churinga and referred to while the story is
told. The meaning of the design on this one is: At a place called Ngapatjimbi
(1) there were a number of grasshoppers. They came out of the ground, and flew
up, and coming down they went into the ground again. The grasshoppers
multiplied, and after the next rain they came out of the places marked (2). They
flew up and came down as men. These men went to Wantangara (3), and going into a
cave, turned into churingas. Just a minute ago I referred to my personal missal as if it were my talisman, and now the churinga turns out to be the sacred written version of a legend, helping the man who knows the legend to recite it correctly. Shouldn't that be some of a precursor to written language? A collection of pointers or route description through the story about the world. Where the totem (symbol) refers to the place of the collection in the landscape (mindscape), the churinga brings in the dimension of time. The right succession of different symbols involved results in a meaningful story. The right succession of human movements results in a coordinated action just the same, when the spiritual story teller reads the symbols one by one and transforms them into the related instructions-train for the action involved. Foggy formulation again. See, I want to relate the functional structure of my mind to the real world organization of the aboriginal society, people being the kids in my head, having molded the world in accordance with brains, or vice versa, in the course of evolution. Reading the preceding text in the opposite direction a little bit further, we arrive at Peter Holden (Ref. 28), with the quote : "Anangu believe that the bodies of Tjukurpa men and women were often transformed into isolated boulders or piles of rock. The places became sacred, and Aborigines born near a sacred site automatically became members of that particular dream ancestor's clan or totem. The journeys undertaken by the Tjukurpa ancestors are perpetually relived through stories and songs. And sites of special importance along the paths they traveled are often named to retain special significance." |
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There you see my father and mother, at the seaside, transformed into the two boulders in the front of the picture. The pile in the beginning of the surf is the rest of my family. I was born at the sea, in Knocke like it was spelled at the time, where I was knocked out of eternity, into the dreamtime. The noise of the surf is the totem of the clan, and we speak to each other like old-time fog horns from the distance, when the wind blows from the right quarter. My grandmother (one of them, the mother of my father) was a specialist in telling hair-raising stories, when we were at the age of four. Mysterious disappearances, ghosts misleading people in the woods so they got lost for days, whirlwinds suddenly coming down out of the blue sky to suck you up and everything else too. A statuette of the Holy Virgin, rotating by itself with her nose pointing to the chimney wall, every year at the same day, to remind something terrible out of the past. And things like that. |
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The stories as such were not so terrifying, but she herself was terrified when telling them. She did not simply believe them, she was scared to death on touching every single word of the story with the white moustache on her wrinkled upper lip, eyes staring in the distance, seeing the spirits walking about. |
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Of course the old witch was highly talented to choose her time to strike. The whirlwind story came in a small back kitchen on the first floor and the whether was ominous dark gray, silent. About the same time, in the room just under the kitchen, grandmother's mother died, and her ghost was still hanging around, together with my memory on her morose expression and her open toothless mouth when she snoozed in the afternoon. |
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There was no whirlwind at all in the sky, but I saw the hose reaching for the ground, coming on in my direction to suck me up. In such circumstances I feel the little hairs creeping on my back, accompanied by the cold shivers. Look at the black wrappings round her neck! I think people in that secluded hole where I come from told their children, and each other, mysterious stories much the same way aborigines did two hundred years ago. Knocke, nota bene, was a place to be for the most exquisite chic of the country, but that was only in summertime, and just is some lanes and avenues and hotels at the beach. Not so in the village or the countryside. |
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Important places got a special name. We as a child invented names for them. The frog-pool for example was an old basement of a German concrete bunker, hidden halfway in the ground somewhere in the woods - a remnant of the 2nd world war. There was always water in it, and swinging tadpoles. |
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Every kid in the neighborhood knew where it was, and it was an easy place for secret appointments, far away form home. There were also places in the golf-course, just behind or before the barbed wire fence : one next to the cows, one at the blackberry bush and the other in the woods. The last one was a personal one, where I liked to bike alongside. Besides the names we invented there also were names given by the adults, common names, but not official. The Devil's hole, for example, where we picked burrs to build houses and throw into the hair of curly girls. |
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The things had a faint sickly smell, were itchy and tickling, but useful all the way, and we gathered handfuls of them. We also had an ant-tree, a hollow old pollard willow, with a population of a billion ants. We once set a small fire in it, and the black devils rolled over and over in big clumps down the hollow. I don't know whether it was the natural scent of ants, or the smell of baked ones, but the sharp smoke coming out of the wriggling mass, together with the huge numbers of the beasts, was overwhelming, and burned a big hole in my brains, visible until now. The same intensity comes into my mind when I remember the camp we built in the woods, under low hanging branches of pine trees, somewhat around a natural pit in the sandy ground. There we smoked our first cigarettes, in the most dark secret, as if it were a sacred ritual, emotionally laden and implicitly installing a club or totemic brotherhood of the evil. What Peter Holden wrote about Anangu (above) could have been written about me and the other naughty boys and girls when I was a child. Totemism generally is related to animism, and therefore seemingly declared old-fashioned rubbish, but a little trip in our own memory, with some effort, reveals terrifying beautifully experienced ghosts and spirits without which everything should have become colorless and flat at the beginning of our existence. Perhaps I am the reincarnation of some aboriginal, who knows. To be continued in : Dreamtime 2 |
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Copyright © 2004 A. Syberg Site Last update 21.01.2007 |
