Keir Martin, 'The location of dreams: further thoughts'

In this paper, I take a series of dreams that I had during anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea as my departure point. The dreams involved ‘visitation’ by the tubuan; an ancestral spirit central to many local ritual practices.  Some of these visitations seemed to blur a simple distinction between dream and reality or a distinction between the tubuan as internal or external object.  Rather than taking an interpretation of the meaning of the dream-tubuan as a starting point, I explore the effect of framing or experiencing of the tubuan as an internal or external object.  Taking the work of theorists such as Winnicott as a starting point, the paper explores the ways in which the boundaries of the self are shaped by the process in which objects move from being experienced as internal or external; a process that fundamentally alters both the objects of perception and the subjects who are shaped by the process of perceiving them.