Ethnography from Aboriginal Australia attests to the significance of dreams in the creation of new songs, designs, and ceremonies. In this article, I examine the relationships between dreams, memory, and creativity in ritual, design, and song creation. Advances made in neuroscience mean that, increasingly, scientists are able to map neural activity occurring in different sleep phases. Can this capability help us to understand the emergence of creativity, such as that which appears to have its origins in dreams? Drawing on cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, I argue that much of the creativity that emerges from dreams is contingent on memory. Memory is both biological and cultural, so culture is implicated in how dreams are imaginatively shaped, remembered, reported, and experienced. Thus, an important link between the apparently autonomous aspects of dreams and the resulting creativity that has been reported in many cultures around the world, in ethnography and by dreamers themselves, is the encultured work of memory.
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