Dreamtime In Australia

My Mystic Lands tour took me to Australia to look primarily at the aborigines tribes of the Anangu and Tiwi as I have now reached the fourth disk of a six disk set.

 

This is a program I'm going to have to watch again (maybe again and again) when I am not distracted by note-taking in order to do a blog post. Honestly, what made this program so interesting to me was the concept - of which before I was totally unaware - known as Dreamtime or The Dreaming. More about that in a moment.

 

My impression overall is that this program lacked some of things that so enthralled me about some of the others. For one, the lack of jaw-dropping ruins pointing to an advanced and sophisticated ancient civilization. Of course that's not the program's fault if there was nothing like that to cover. Instead we are treated to a look at a very primitive people who - if this program is accurate - seem to have remained primitive in many of their ways over the centuries.

 

Having gotten over that disappointment, there is, as I mentioned above, the aborigines' concept of Dreamtime. The program narrator explained it this way:

 

Aborigines believe they're direct descendants of their spirit ancestors and that all inanimate objects and all living things are inhabited by their ancestor's spirits. Rocks, trees, insects, even the waterhole is a part of their spiritual heritage. This is the essence of Dreamtime. More than just a creation myth, it's a realm in which spirits still exist. And each day, by renewing and maintaining the land, aborigines are able to enter into a mystical communion with their spirit ancestors.  

 

And we are told that Dreamtime guides them still with sacred knowledge about survival skills, better toolmaking and knowledge about when fruit is ready to eat.

 

If I'm tempted to be disappointed that Dreamtime doesn't seem to have advanced them farther, it is a fact that the aborigines were very isolated from the rest of civilization, Australia being the most isolated of all the world's continents. And if Dreamtime is a concept that might hold for humans in general (I'm wildly speculating here, of course), that some intuitive ability led to some of humankind's better developments and concepts, it certainly would have been a hindrance to be so isolated from other peoples and not have the ability to share.

 

This program whetted my appetite for learning more about Dreamtime. Even the word itself strikes my fancy. Is Dreamtime similar to Plato's theory of forms? That was the connection my mind was making as the program played. One thing is certain. This is another examination of the widespread belief that there is - alongside the world we live in and consider reality - a spiritual realm that exists and influences this realm.

 

Have any of my readers ever heard of Dreamtime?