ABSTRACT
From an early age, children learn the importance attached to dream experiences. Individual dreams, which for example warn a child about food avoidance, encourage the emergence of individual autonomy, a quality valued by the Temiars. Children are encouraged to dream and to report their dreams to their parents. For the Temiars it is the absence of head-soul that enables the dreaming and trancing and thus the creativity to emerge through dreams and trance in music and dance. Stewart suggests that they are repressed and directed into the dream life of the Temiars. Many dream theorists suggest that they allow us to experience thoughts and feelings that cannot be expressed in other ways. The midwife establishes individual relationships with people who are ill, pregnant, and newly-delivered women and newborn babies. Although her ‘patients’ tend to be women, men also consult her for sexual problems.
