Dreams, Perception, and Creative Realization.

In Aboriginal Australian contexts, perceptual openness that extends from waking life into dreaming provides a cognitive framework for understanding dream experiences. This cultural orientation resembles the personality trait of openness to experience, which has been linked to dream recall frequency. Identifying perceptual openness at a cultural rather than individual level reveals how cultural differences shape perception, indicating cognitive diversity. Given the connection between dreams and creativity suggested by anecdotal evidence and research, a cultural orientation toward perceptual openness likely influences creativity realized through dreams. However, such creativity cannot be separated from the relational context in which dream material is elaborated and understood.

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Abstract

This article draws on the ethnography of Aboriginal Australia to argue that perceptual openness, extending from waking life into dreaming experience, provides an important cognitive framework for the apprehension of dreamt experience in these contexts. I argue that this perceptual openness is analogous to the "openness to experience" described as a personality trait that had been linked with dream recall frequency (among other things). An implication of identifying perceptual openness at a cultural rather than at an individual level is two-fold. It provides an example of the ways in which cultural differences affect perception, indicative of cognitive diversity; and, given the relationship between dreams and creativity suggested anecdotally and through research, a cultural orientation toward perceptual openness is also likely to have implications for the realization of creativity that occurs through dreams. Such creativity though cannot be separated from the relational context in which such dreamt material is elaborated and understood.