The Dreamtime

There is a question so basic that most people have never noticed they answered it. Where is the past? In the framework most listeners inherited, the answer is simple: the past is behind you. Time is a line, and you are a moving point on it. What has already happened is located back there — receding, fixed, finished. History is the study of what is no longer here. Memory is the attempt to reach backward. The past cannot be entered. It can only be remembered. This framework is so ordinary that it can feel less like a framework and more like the nature of time itself. But it is a framework. And it is not the only one. Among many Aboriginal Australian communities, there is a way of understanding time and landscape that does not map onto this line. It is sometimes called the Dreamtime, though that English translation is imprecise and even misleading — the word "dream" suggests unreality, and that is the opposite of what is meant.