What Leaves the Body in Dreams

For the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea, as for many indigenous peoples, dreaming is what happens when part of you leaves the body and travels somewhere else. The Mekeo call that traveling self the lalauga, a term often translated as "soul" or "spirit". Australian anthropologist Michele Stephen suggests we call it simply the "dream-self" and recognize that in their description of its comings and goings the "primitive" Mekeo may have developed a clearer view and more exact vocabulary than many educated Westerners.       
     "Dreaming (nipi) is caused by the activity of the dream-self (lalauga) when separated from the physical body (imauga) and is later recalled in waking thought. One speaks of ‘I’, the waking conscious self, as performing or undertaking the dreaming – lau la nipi. That is to say, dreaming is a state experienced by ‘I’, but it is a state caused by the action of my dream-self in leaving my body. One part of the self is able somehow to observe the actions and desires of another part of the self.
   "I would suggest that Mekeo culture provides a means of discriminating more finely than we do in ordinary speech between different orders of experience....Mekeo discriminate not only between two different states of awareness, but between two different aspects of self involved."

 

Source: Michele Stephen, A’aiasa’s Gifts: A Study of Magic and the Self. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).