Paper short abstract:

The psychoanalytic notion that diverse personages in dreams embody aspects of a relational self was also articulated by many of my Aboriginal interlocutors who commonly assumed strangers in dreams to be disguised familiars and/or ancestors of some kind.

Paper long abstract:

A Western ontology of dreaming tends to construe it as a form of marked withdrawal from the world with its usual laws of time and space, sequential narratives, and underlying principles of identity. In this regard dreaming is seen to be an asocial or even socially alienating experience. This is further intensified by the fact that the dream's meaning is often opaque to the dreamer themselves and to their significant others outside of a process of carefully situating a dreamt imagery in relation to the dreamer's personal symbolic world and biography.

However, is also the case though that that very withdrawal from the well patrolled boundaries of the waking self may open up the dreamer to an expanded form of social experience and this is one quality of the dreaming experience in which a psychoanalytic view overlaps to some degree with some of the interpretations of my Kimberley Aboriginal family, friends and colleagues. I say this because the psychoanalytic notion that diverse personages in dreams embody aspects of a relational self was also articulated by many of my Aboriginal interlocutors who commonly assumed strangers in dreams to be disguised familiars and/or ancestors of some kind. Familiars, in both instances, are those with whom intercorporeal substances are shared to greater or lesser extents. In the dreams I discuss in this paper we can discern serial, shifting identifications with, as well as distancing from, the other personages encountered in dreams. Some of these involved close kin while others made reference to non-Aboriginal or non-human others.