ABSTRACT
In the 1930s, an American psychologist named Kilton Stewart accompanied a British anthropologist, Pat Noone, into the tropical rainforest of the Malay Peninsula to meet those whom he subsequently and idyllically described as the 'dream people'--the Senoi aboriginals. Senoi groups certainly practice various forms of trancing and shamanistic rituals, and they do adhere to egalitarian and peaceful ideologies, but there is no evidence that they think about or use dreaming in the way that Stewart portrays. He, however, felt conveyed into the universe of Freudian fairy-tales. Broadly speaking, on the part of western thinkers one senses an uneasy combination of guilt over exploitation of the Third World and existential insecurity about the western world itself. Much western interest in Third World knowledge and cultural products is a kind of spiritual quest--a searching for a deeper meaning to life or art which somehow got lost during the industrialization of western societies.
