The Dreaming
The Dreaming
The Dreaming (often rendered in English as Dreamtime, though this is now widely regarded as misleading) is the foundational concept of Aboriginal Australian spirituality. It refers simultaneously to the ancestral epoch in which the world was shaped, the ancestral beings who undertook that shaping, and the enduring law and order that continues to structure reality in the present. The Dreaming is therefore not merely a mythic past, but an ever-present dimension of existence that links land, people, law, and cosmology into a single, integrated system.
In Dreaming narratives, ancestral beings travelled across a formless or primordial landscape, creating geographical features, plants, animals, and human social arrangements through their actions. These journeys are often mapped onto specific routes, commonly called songlines, which encode geographical, ecological, and ritual knowledge. The land itself is thus understood as a record of ancestral activity. Sacred sites mark points of particular creative or transformative significance, and access to, or responsibility for, these sites is governed by complex kinship and custodial arrangements.
Crucially, the Dreaming establishes Law (often glossed as Lore): the moral, social, and ritual order by which life should be lived. This includes rules governing marriage, kinship obligations, initiation rites, food taboos, and responsibilities to Country. Knowledge of the Dreaming is not uniformly distributed. It is acquired progressively through age, initiation, and social status, and different versions of a Dreaming narrative may coexist, each appropriate to a particular audience or ceremonial context.
The Dreaming is also continuous rather than closed. Ancestral beings did not simply vanish after creation; they are understood to persist within the land, the sky, particular species, or ritual objects. Human beings participate in the Dreaming through ritual performance, storytelling, art, and the ongoing maintenance of Country. In this sense, the Dreaming functions less like a creed to be believed and more like a framework for living, one in which cosmology, ethics, ecology, and social identity are inseparable.