Among Australia's indigenous Aborigine culture, 'dreamtime' is a place that is everywhere and now
If you are a fan of comic book writer/novelist, Neil Gaiman, you might be familiar with him being inspired by 'Dreamtime' as a belief system of the Australian aborigines and using that as a springboard for putting together, The Dreaming for Sandman.
'Dreamtime' refers to an experience and to beliefs that the Australian native people practive about getting into a dream state to communicate with their ancestors and identifying the dream state as a place in time that is everywhere, where ancestors can help them foresee the future and advise them about their current worries.
For the Aborigines, DREAMTIME, is where all things were born, where ancestors continue eternal lives and influence the lives of those in temporal time as flesh and blood living beings, where the ways of life and death are taught so people can survive, and in dreamtime, the source of power for living is revealed to the tribes.
'Dreamtime' is a condition beyond time and space and different from the time and space we inhabit or physically know. The aborigines desribe Dreamtime as 'all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ sequential or linear time. Aborigines experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. A tribal member is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe from oral tradition about what dreamtime is all about.
Each person has a part of their nature that is eternal and which was already existing even before a person became flesh and blood by being born of a mother. Living through the sequential or linear timeline, a person returns to the 'forever time' when he dies. But as living flesh, man can enter the eternal time through dreams or dreaming---sometimes as a ritual for creating an altered state of consciousness where he can encounter images and commune with ancestral spirits unseen in the physical world. Encountering dreams is also considered a natural act because one just visits the 'all-at-once' which is the eternal and not the temporal state of linear time. Life for a being in dreamtime has no end.
By interacting with Dreamtime, the living interact with their ancestors and gain knowledge from the eternal to assist them as they go through the linear temporal existence. The future is less uncertain if one links with the place and time of everywhere and forever. In Dreamtime. the limits of time and space are overcome. Life does not end for man according to the aborigines when his flesh dies, because that eternal part of men just return to where they truly belong. Because the Aborigines also believe in reincarnation, death is a respite as the eternal self finds immortality again or chooses being born into flesh again.
