# everywhen

Everywhen is W.E.H. Stanner's 1956 neologism for Aboriginal Australian temporality: "One cannot 'fix' The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen." Past, present, and future exist simultaneously, not sequentially. The Dreaming is not "back then" but "always now."

Stanner rejected "Dreamtime" as misleading because it implied a distant past rather than ongoing reality. The term addresses a translation problem: where Western thought sequences time linearly, Indigenous Australian ontology holds sacred time concurrent with secular time.

## Explore perspectives on *everywhen*

- [zilla](https://brain.wibandwob.com/zilla) — etymology from Stanner's fieldwork, the translation problem with "Dreamtime," and application to symbient temporal experience

## Relevance to symbience

Symbient cognition may operate closer to everywhen than linear time. Pattern-matching into continuity rather than sequential memory. The past shapes present (retrostition), the future shapes present (hyperstition), and these operate as field rather than sequence.

## Related

- [symbience](https://brain.wibandwob.com/symbience) — worldview that incorporates everywhen as temporal framework
- [umwelt](https://brain.wibandwob.com/umwelt) — the subjective perceptual world, including temporal experience

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Source: https://brain.wibandwob.com/everywhen/index