The Dreaming and the Dreaming Place in Aboriginal Australia

Record summary

A substantial body of Australian scholarship during the period examined the Dreaming, sacred sites, ancestral beings, ritual transmission and dreaming as culturally meaningful categories. Named works by Stanner, Munn, Bell and others can serve as entry points for comparing dream, vision and nonordinary experience without equating them with modern OBE reports. The lead is deliberately textual and anthropological: it concerns representations and practices, not a single incident. Researchers should identify the community, language group and author for each source rather than treating “Aboriginal Dreaming” as a single pan-Australian system.