Dreamtime
1
9.9
- noun
- Australian
:
Tiempo de los sueños
- The importance of the Dreamtime in Aboriginal belief systems underscores their connection to nature and spirituality.
- Dreamtime stories
Examples
-
In Aboriginal culture, the Dreamtime represents the era when ancestral spirits shaped the land and its laws.
-
The northern Australian terrain, created by Ancestor Beings eons ago during what the Aboriginal people know as the Dreamtime, is so rugged that many sites remain unknown to outsiders.
Academic text (2002) -
We are in the Dreamtime!
-
A spirit from the Dreamtime.
-
I was born... ..in the midst of the Dreamtime.
-
Some people of unusual spiritual powers have contact with the Dreamtime.
-
Whatever happens in the Dreamtime... establishes the values, symbols and laws of Aboriginal society.
-
They hurled fire sticks as though they were warding off night demons that escaped from the Dreamtime.
Academic text (1999) -
There is an aboriginal folk story that tells us that the world is in a continual state of creation, a continual state of dreamtime kept alive by story, song, and art.
Academic text (2009) -
Legends from the Dreamtime tell the stories of how the world was created by ancient beings.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Dreamtime comes from the English words dream ('images or stories while sleeping') and time ('a period'), and English speakers used this phrase to name the Aboriginal sacred idea often called the 'Dreaming'. So Dreamtime now means the sacred time of stories when ancestors made the world and set the laws and traditions.