dreamtime

name

1. The time of the creation of the world, by the ancestors out of their own essence.

   “No, Brian Elliott's hobby-horse is not the Jindyworobaks' political links—it is his conviction that they are to be remembered and well respected for their awareness of Aboriginal myth and legend and for their understanding and symbolic poetical use of the alcheringa concept (the Dreamtime myth of the creation of geological Australia and its flora and fauna with the related religious and moral connotations of site-worship and animism) .”

   “The tall slender birds were performing a legendary fight in the Dreamtime story – one that the old law had marked on them forever with a wattle of flaming red skin on the back of their heads.”

2. (alt-of, alternative, proscribed)Alternative form of Dreamtime.

   “Initially, having been denied access to men's society and their secret ceremonies, Munn encountered the dreamtime among women, in the occasion of their daily storytelling.”

   “In becoming the ancestral life-force, the ritual principals are "taken out of profane 'becoming'" and are placed within the dreamtime: "Every ritual, and every meaningful act that man performs repeats a mythical archetype; and ... this repetition involves the abolition of profane time and placing of man in a magico-relitious time which has no connection with succession in the true sense, but forms the 'eternal' now of mythical time."”

   “The dreamtime also conveys certain notions of morality.”