Author: Hume, Lynne
Paperback
224 pages
Published: May 2002
Melbourne University Press
ISBN: 052285012X
This item non-returnable. Order may not be canceled.

This text examines anew the concept known as the dreaming using research on consciousness studies. This examination tackles the thorny subject of Aborigines and religion and offers an alternative explanation of dreamtime. No previous study has focused on Aboriginal spirituality using a multidisciplinary approach to consciousness. This study details a vast amount of existing documentation, carefully considers what Aborigines have to say about the meaning of dreaming, and offers a new interpretation in light of what we now know about consciousness. The author's research also suggests that Aborigines had ways of accessing what many regard as different levels of consciousness.Australian Aborigines have expressed the idea of ancestral presence as a power existing in land, painting, dance, song, blood and ceremonial objects - a concept known in English as the Dreaming. This text examines how aspects of the Dreaming may have been linked to altered states of consciousness.