Archaic and Enigmatic …

Throughout my story, Songlines and Dreaming keep returning. I speak of African journeys, yet I repeatedly borrow terms from the mythology of Aboriginal Australia.

What are Songlines?

Songlines are mythical pathways traced by ancestral creator beings during the Dreaming, when they shaped the world—mountains, waterholes, animals, and laws.
Each Songline is a map encoded in song. By singing, Aboriginal people remember routes, water sources, animals, stories, and rituals. The songs are simultaneously history, navigation, identity, and spiritual connection to the land. Some Songlines cross vast territories—thousands of kilometers—linking different peoples.

What right did I have to speak of Dreaming and Songlines?
You said knowledge wants to be shared. I was never entirely sure.

In the silence of the gorge, I wondered whether we had unknowingly followed a Songline. Whether our path had long been recorded in a song older than maps, languages, and memory—and whether it had guided us without our knowing.

Perhaps the song was never meant for us, and we were only allowed to hear it.

Were we following a line we had not chosen, but remembered?
Was the land calling us?
Was our route, in truth, a resonance chamber for messages meant only for us?

Was this imagination reckless? What did we really know?

“Dreaming” reduces the concept to a Western notion of dreams—inner, psychological, fictional. Such translation ignores an ontological framework in which creation, land, identity, and action are inseparably intertwined.
I was fascinated by this cosmology: a complete, non-technological interpretive system reflecting a way of life that, for most of the 300,000 years of human existence, was daily practice.

I will not start talking about “Stone Age high tech.”
But to me, it suggested an invitation—to perceive other ways of being. Less individualistic. More embedded. More relational. Bound to place, time, and ancestors.

It contrasted sharply with Western ideas of autonomy, progress, and separation.
Perhaps that is precisely why approaching Dreaming with respect and openness matters—not to appropriate it, but to understand that the world can be thought differently.

Once, I tried to read Sigmund Freud in an unconventional way—as someone who created a European, urban variant of “Dreaming,” though anchored in rationality and individual psychology.

Dreaming, in Aboriginal cultures, is collective, mythic, timeless, cyclical, landscape-bound, and identity-forming. It explains how the world came into being and how humans, places, animals, and laws are connected.

Freud’s dream interpretation, by contrast, is individual, psychological, linear, inwardly directed, and symbolic. Yet it is also a cartography of the invisible—an attempt to interpret meaning through narrative structures and symbolic figures emerging from another layer of consciousness.

Both systems—Dreaming and Freud’s theory of the unconscious—attempt to make hidden forces, which structure visible life, comprehensible.
Both recognize dreams as mediators of deeper truth.
Both use narrative, image, and symbolism to translate the invisible.
Both function, ultimately, as systems of meaning—with ethical, social, or healing roles.

Freud internalized myth. He located it within the individual psyche.
This marks the great shift—from mythic world-understanding to the modern Western interior self.

The Eurocentric gaze remains visible. Freud, who drew on archaic myths and so-called “primitive” cultures, often treated them as projection screens for Western psychic conflicts, without grasping their internal logic. His model of the psyche is deeply rooted in the cultural self-image of the West.
The “primal horde,” the “primitive self,” fantasies of wildness—all followed a taxonomy shaped by the industrial age, culminating in the European bourgeois male as implicit norm.

Freud wrote about “savages” without ever meeting them. They functioned as conceptual devices.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques is a milestone of ethnology, yet also reflects a melancholic, aestheticized encounter with the Other—measuring the self against difference, turning the Other into a mirror of European crisis.

And André Malraux—wandering Cambodia with colonial arrogance, treating temple reliefs as trophies. Long before becoming a celebrated writer and Minister of Culture, he was a looter—convinced that great artworks must be “saved,” even if torn from their context.
In 1923, he had temple reliefs removed from Banteay Srei—delicate apsara figures carved in pink sandstone. He was arrested, convicted, and quickly released. Later, he reinvented himself as a defender of culture against oblivion. The white arrogance remained intact.

Malraux was not an exception. Entire Western museums are built on this gesture: the belief that admiration confers ownership. The colonial gaze changes costume. Appropriation still bears the signature of intrusion: We give you meaning by taking you away.