Dreamtime (mythology)

Dreamtime (also dream time, dream-time) is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Baldwin Spencer and thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who, however, later revised his views. The Dreaming is used to represent many Aboriginal concepts of "time out of time," or "everywhen," when the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. They were often distinct from "gods" as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped, but only revered.

The term is based on a rendition of the indigenous (Arandic) word alcheringa, used by the Aranda (Arunta, Arrernte) people of Central Australia, although it appears that it is based on a misunderstanding or mistranslation. William Stanner remarked: "why the blackfellow thinks of 'dreaming' as the nearest equivalent in English is a puzzle". It has been argued that the word's meaning is closer to "eternal, uncreated."

By the 1980s, "Dreamtime" and "the Dreaming" had acquired their own currency in popular culture, based on idealised or fictionalised conceptions of Australian mythology. Since the 1970s, "Dreaming" and "Dream time" have also returned from academic usage via popular culture and tourism and are now ubiquitous in the English vocabulary of indigenous Australians in a kind of "self-fulfilling academic prophecy".

The station-master, magistrate and amateur ethnographer Francis Gillen first used the terms in an ethnographical report in 1896. With Baldwin Spencer Gillen, he published in 1899 a major work, Native Tribes of Central Australia. In that work, they spoke of the Alcheringa as "the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal". Five years later, in their Northern tribes of central Australia, they gloss the far distant age as "the dream times", link it to the word alcheri meaning "dream", and affirm that the term is current also among the Kaitish and Unmatjera.

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