Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness

Abstract

Dreams and the supernatural are perhaps the two cultural realms most infused with imagination. The Asabano of Papua New Guinea’s Sandaun Province share with one another numerous accounts of supernatural experiences that occur not only in dreams, but also in trance and alert awareness. I collected many of these during fieldwork among them in 1994–95. Nearly twenty years earlier they had abandoned their traditional religion and adopted Baptist Christianity. Supernatural encounters experienced in pre-conversion times influenced the content of later experiences in Christian times. Both indigenous and exogenous cultural forms are found in each person’s experience, and spirits of local and foreign myth borrow characteristics from one another. Likewise, memories of supernatural experiences in one state of consciousness shaped and encouraged such experiences in other states. In a daily cycle, memories of the day’s events or “day residues” shape dreams, and memories of dreams or “night residues” shape waking experiences, particularly those that rely heavily on imagining.