Dreams, laki, and mourning: a psychoanalytic ethnography of the Yagwoia "inner feminine": Part II soul and the oneiro-dynamics of luck.

Mimica, Jadran

GAMBLING AND THE LIFE-DEATH FLOW

In the first instalment I examined Tilm's (woman) and QANG's (man) un/conscious dynamics of their 'internal object-relations', specifically their contra-sexual self-circuity. (1) During his first initiation (nose-piercing) QANG's phallic generativity became restructured and determined as the contra-sexual relation to his 'internal' feminine object constituted within his pre-Oedipal maternal matrix (Mimica, 2006:44-52). As we shall presently see, his feminine self-circuity, the primary narcissistic core of his egoity, has a critical significance in his pursuit of gambling (laki). This recently introduced practice is a vital sector of the sphere of male generative activity in general. Through the exploration of the vicissitudes of QANG's soul to maintain his grip on this elusive domain I will illuminate both its cosmo-ontological constitution within the bounds of the Yagwoia life-world and the specificities of the psycho-dynamics of QANG's 'inner' feminine object relatedness.

Yagwoia men are avid cards and dice players. (2) Outwardly the Yagwoia pursuit of these two kinds of chance games has a striking compulsive obsessional veneer. I am always impressed at the sight of a group of some 20-odd men and children forming a tight double circle, the outer standing up, the inner squatted, all immobile in the pouring rain, eyes glued to the narrow space where the cards or dice and money are moving around, changing hands and fortune. The severity of the elements won't make them budge unless there is a sense that the succession of rounds has either exhausted itself or is indecisive enough as to which way the winning 'number' will go so that the game can be interrupted without any sense of rupture within the flow. But if a round is in the train of an already well set vector of fortune so that somebody is definitely on the winning trajectory, or the persistent loser is hoping that the next round is likely to be his break, to interrupt the flow just because of such an external contingency as a downpour is like meddling with a finely tuned gravitational field which must be preserved no matter what. Any suggestion of getting away from the rain is angrily shouted down and the game is relentlessly continued even if most of the encircling onlookers may be moved to run for cover when the sheets of rain start literally pelting on them. If anything, the players will place over their heads a bark-cape, towels, or a piece of plastic but primarily to protect the space where the cards and money are doing their run; as for their bodies they are literally abstracted out of the situation. The game and its flow are like a gravitational pull of the force emanating from the egoities of the players themselves.

Indeed, the force dynamics of these games depends on the egoic experiences and investments that all Yagwoia players continuously articulate through their self-projections and, most importantly, dreams. Playing 'laki', as gambling is called in Tok Pisin, is outwardly a cultural form within the Yagwoia life-world of the most recent external derivation. (3) It was introduced by the returned indentured labourers from coastal plantations. Traditionally there were no 'games of luck' but, by the same token, what is termed 'luck' cannot be taken for granted. It can be meaningfully approached solely in terms of the intra-cultural understanding of how the human egoic self understands and interacts with the experiential horizons of its existential umwelt. From this perspective, the Yagwoia games of laki pertain to the same egoic habitus of traditional pursuits such as sexuality, hunting, warfare, and acquisition of wealth. All subsist upon the global flow of life-and- death within the world-body (the libido-mortido flux) which as such simultaneously generates and sustains human egoic selves and their corporeality. In the Yagwoia life-world laki is not a blind chance within a field of human actions such as a game of cards or dice but an indeterminate potential of such activities to work in favour of an ego in so far as his soul can be exposed to the right kind of vision pertaining to the activity of gambling. In this regard gambling as a human action in the world is no different from any other actions; hunting, war, wanting to have sex, planting a new garden, making salt or bark-capes, etc. Not all Yagwoia human actions depend on the use of such wish-directing and commanding activities as spell incantations which are accompanied by the handling of various substances (ordinarily known in the anthropological universe of meaning as 'magical' practices) but many of them do. All of them are subject to presentiment as to how they may turn out if one would carry them through. This is what dreams articulate all the time. In fact there is no aspect of egoic existence which does not invoke some kind of presentiment, and dreams, because they are not immediately transparent, may easily cast the ego into a self-perplexing mode which solicits a momentary sense of dislodgment from the horizon of familiar and taken for granted to the horizon of unfamiliarity with one's own experience. Accordingly the Yagwoia have a fully fledged knowledge of typified dream images, scenarios, and actions which are used for making sense out of dream showings. Many of these demand decisive action precisely because, no matter how illusory a dream may be, as an experience it is always real and involves the dreamer's and other people's souls, and virtually always spirits.

In this regard the games of laki are fully integrated into the oneiric knowledge of Yagwoia self and its actions. Playing laki is to act in the mode of Yagwoia interactions with the world, and fundamentally in terms of their desires and cravings. Accordingly, laki itself is generated by the psychosexual matrix of their selves within the Yagwoia ontological parameters of existence. There is a definite yet wide enough range of typical dream imagery and situations that show the dreamer whether he will attract the card/dice number and money to himself and therefore can be self-assured that he'll win if he plays. It is of singular importance to play as soon as possible after such a dream-showing or else this momentary empowerment of the soul will pass him by. It is the same with hunting, fighting, adulterous sexual exploits, or some other undertakings.

For instance in hunting, the likelihood of finding a wild fowl's nest with eggs, and more so a cassowary's nest and eggs, is less than of encountering a marsupial and catching it. This is why the Yagwoia are definite that unless a man has dreamt about finding a wild fowl's or cassowary's nest there is no way that he will be able to do that on his own. Therefore when one has had such a dream he should waste no time; first thing in the morning, at the crack of dawn, he must shoot off into the forest because in the dream his soul has shown him the outcome of the undertaking. In the dream the conjunction between the person's soul and a particular thing has already occurred. Therefore one mustn't hesitate; to act in the wakeful world is to bring this showing into a complete actualisation. Unlike dream-showings which can lead to the permanent empowerment of the soul, such as in the development of shamanistic powers, hunting and other similar showings are impermanent. Nevertheless one can have a soul which has a well primed disposition for one or several recurrent showings of certain thematic visions which means that such a person has a soul which will seldom go amiss. (4) For instance one can be renowned for the frequency of finding wild fowl and/or cassowary eggs; he does so precisely because he has regular dreams pertaining to this activity. Accordingly, his soul has the power. But he can lose it; he stops dreaming altogether or only rarely gets to have the typical dream.

Likewise with laki which, in terms of its oneiro-poesis, is articulated through virtually the same dream scenarios that traditionally pertain to sexuality, hunting, warfare, and the acquisition of wealth. To be sure, the theme of sexuality is immanent in all other activities. This also allows for multiple possibilities of interpretation conditioned by contexts. However, there are some dream motifs and scenarios which are thematically fairly restricted. A man may have one portentous dream pertaining to gambling or recurrent dreams on this thematic complex and accordingly will be enticed to play wherever he has it. But he may play regardless of such motivation hoping that, all the same, sooner or later he'll attract the cards/dice numbers and, by the same token, experience if only fleetingly his power over other men. He has managed to extract their wealth (money) from them which is nothing less then the loss of a certain amount of their own embodied flow. Given this fully developed oneiro-poetic and libidinal-aggressive dimension of playing laki (5) the only aspect that hasn't been yet articulated is the use of spells. The imaginal-noetic conditions for it are fully ripe and there are individuals who secretly use powerful relics when they play. For instance one man kept a couple of his wife's deceased father's (actually her FB's) teeth. He extracted them from his skull following the decomposition of the body and kept it attached to his necklace. He would secretly call the deceased's name (i.e., calling his spirit) to help him win. He would never do this overtly fearing that other players would get cross with him for calling on such invisible assistance. The man averred that this particular power object had helped him win many times.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF QANG'S SOUL'S LAKI-POWER

The Yagwoia laki, like all other transmissions of bodily substances qua things and wealth, is also a means for the global excorporative and incorporative circulation of countless currents of the ceaselessly totalising life-and-death flow that circulates simultaneously in so many human corpuscles and in their absolute embodiment, the macro-cosmic world-body. As so many of his fellow Yagwoia QANG is also an avid cards and dice player. As mentioned in the first part of this study (Mimica, 2006:38), he won on laki the money for his third and favourite wife while working as a government interpreter in Mrw. And their conjoined flow produced him no less than five living daughters, which in turn brought in more 'flooding water' (aalye wa:le), a metaphoric expression for bride-price shells/money, which in turn yielded their respective children. Now there was a period in QANG's life, mainly during the seventies and into the eighties, when he was winning money on cards/dice so frequently that this became his characteristic attribute, a man who knows to win money on cards. This was really due to his soul-power which as such was sustained through a recurrent dream. There were other thematically related dreams, but the recurrent one (Dream 3) crucially determined his laki complex.

Dream 3.

 I used to see in a dream a wild fowl's nest and eggs (cilpaye-mne).
 I used to see thus: in the forest I see wild fowl's nest, a mound
 of fallen leaves rubbish that the wild fowl heaped up, made its
 house (aane = nest). The mother (female wild fowl) was sitting on
 the top. And I went to the nest and the wild fowl mother would fly
 away. Flew away now, I threw off all the leaf-trash and uncover the
 eggs in the nest. There were many of them in the wild fowl's house
 (there is a sense of them being inexhaustible). I would then spread
 a towel or bark-cape or my shirt on the ground and proceed to put
 the eggs from the nest onto it (the impromptu carry-bag). I would
 pile up the eggs until I couldn't put any more. Then I would take
 the top (corner-sides) of the cape (or towel) with my teeth and
 lift them with my both hands from underneath and carry them away.
 They were truly heavy. And I thought (in the dream)--I am carrying
 real wild fowl's eggs. No! I got up (woke up) shaken up. I dreamt.
 This is what I dreamt, all the time.

After such a dream QANG would go to play cards and he would inevitably win. His way was to start playing with minimal throws; he said 1 or 5 toea. This is an exaggeration but the point is that he would always start with, say, 10 or 20 toea coins (equivalent of l0 and 20 cents denominations) which is like a bite for bigger amounts and denominations belonging to other men. With his soul-showing in his sight he was assured that the cards or dice numbers would come his way and the money would follow as it did. The idea is that one must think of and focus on the dream. His kune umpne (thought soul) will thereby cover up and overcome the souls of the opponents. As one young informant commented: 'you will see their eyes-nose (face) dripping sweat. (..) Your number (cards) will go up and their's will go down.' The soul empowered by the dream-showing will make the opponents send off their money to the one whose win has already been foreshadowed in the dream.

QANG was thus consistently pulling other men's money. The wild-fowl mother and her eggs was the central image. Sometimes he would dream a similar scenario but instead of eggs he, i.e., his soul, would come to a pandanus palm and many of its nuts would fall onto the ground. They were still new with characteristic whitish colouring. Again, he would pile them up and carry them away and this would mean that he will win big money on laki. Note that here the wild fowl eggs are substituted by nuts. Still another characteristic dream-showing which figured in this fecund period of his gambling pursuit was a sort of wallet with zipper filled with red ulamana seeds (6) (of a tree species). The zipper would open up, he would look inside, put both hands into it and take a plenitude of the red seeds. This was his dream-imagery repertoire of which the most frequent and libidinally most intensely charged was the wild-fowl eggs vision. Others are its transfigurations within one and the same thematic complex of QANG's egoic self and its internal object relations.

In terms of the Yagwoia self-understanding of their soul working, the crucial motif in the wild fowl vision is QANG's uncovering of eggs. I will explicate this detail as the nexus of his soul's conjunction with the showing which enables him to attract the powerful numbers of cards/dice and money. This also is the circuity of his soul's power, so long as he could dream the same vision (or its equivalents) time and again. The mere fact of its repetitiveness clearly indicates its intra-psychic energic (libidinal) cathexis whereby the vision is experienced as power and motivating force. The vision is the function of QANG's total un/conscious psycho-sexual dynamics, of his desires and egoic strivings, and in particular his wealth acquisitiveness fixated on the pursuit of laki. The internal psycho-sexual determination of this complex will become clearer through his other diacritical soul-showings. Let me first clarify the immediately apparent significations of the imagery itself and the dream scenario.

The wild fowl eggs vision is manifestly an expression of female characteristics and meanings, although they do not exclude simultaneous male significations. The wild fowl is the 'mother' which broods on a multiplicity of eggs. These picture the desired object, traditionally the cowrie shells which by 1983 became universally displaced by money. All shells, not just the cowries (and qua them the money) have semenal-generative value and identity. (7) Eggs, not just because of their white shells but also because the content (yoke and white), are their kulpne (semen) and out of them hatch chicks. They are fecund and they multiply which is the irreducible power of all generative substance--its ceaseless prolificacy. This was expressly evident in the vision. No matter how many eggs he took from the (seemingly finite) heap of the nest there were plenty more eggs. They are inexhaustible. The same is with their other substitutes--the pandanus nuts and ulamana seeds. (8)

Eggs (like the pandanus nuts) resonate with the shape of the breast but precisely as such, in the Yagwoia universe of meaningfulness, they are simultaneously phallic. And substantially so since the milk they express is the same homogenetic substance as the semen (Mimica, 1991). The word for breast is aamne, composed of the initial vowel, indicating femaleness (9) and the same components as the word for egg--mne. They occur in a cluster of words which both phonemically and semantically constitute a dense field of interwoven representations entirely determined by the imaginal dynamics of the Yagwoia Self. Likewise, in terms of its lingual substantiality, wild fowl (silpaye) is replete with amplified female quiddity as indicated by the bold-faced female phonemes which readily resonate with and invoke a whole range of mythopoeic imagery. (10)

These don't have to be discussed here but I will mention that this forest scenario of encounter with the wild fowl and its nest also features in a myth that every Yagwoia, male and female, learns as a child. The central theme of the myth is brother^sister incest and its radical consequences for the boy--he undergoes initiation ordeals. One of the central moments in the story is when the boy, who made sex with his sister, stumbles in the forest upon a wild fowl nest, removes the eggs and he enters the nest where he becomes as dead. This is his initiatory transformation. His sister finds him there and revives him but she has now ceased to be his sister. Instead she has become his woman who leads him back into the village and bears him a child. The myth articulates with astonishing lucidity the dynamics of incestuous desire binding the cross-sex siblings. Here it is sufficient just to refer to the myth's image of the wild-fowl nest as a maternal-feminine womb but which, because it is in the forest, in the realm of the macro-cosmic world-body, has the significance of impersonal autochthony and auto-generativity. This is the critical aspect of Yagwoia male initiations and that is what the mythic motif clearly brings out. In respect of QANG's dream-vision this aspect is equally present. The maternal-feminine quiddity of the wild fowl, her eggs and the womb-nest (also referred to as aane = house) is thus amplified; but precisely as a generative abode in the forest it indicates an impersonal mode of auto-generative fecundity which has been secured for QANG by his soul's dream vision. (11)

Clearly, then, in terms of QANG's un/conscious libidinal-aggressive self-structuration of his internal object relations, the recurrent vision articulates an internal positive libidinal binding of his contra-sexual feminine self-object (12) manifest as the wild fowl and her nest and eggs. The dynamics is of a prolific sexual conjunction since, to paraphrase the manifest imagery of the vision, by permanently uncovering the eggs he has secured for himself a fecund womb (nest) that generates inexhaustible eggs (wealth). It is a trans/personal, auto-generative womb but, nevertheless, it is he who has literally plugged himself into it. The fecundity of the womb is diverted into his body and on a more permanent basis since the dream is recurrent. Remaining still at the level of the dream imagery, it can be said that his un/conscious presences an impersonal feminine libidinal zone of the world-body, and this is what QANG is having access to. In the dimension of wakeful reality this is actualised as his power to attract, siphon into and bind to himself other men's money, the substantiality of their proliferating flow.

Just to amplify more the contra-sexual conjunctive dynamics of the wild fowl scenario, other dream motifs which picture the attraction of money in gambling manifestly involve sexual conjunction with a woman. The strongest mode is when the dreamer is captured by a woman who wants to kiss him and have sex while he resists or doesn't want her. (13) This means that cards and money want to catch him no matter what. As it were, the flow is directed at him despite himself. Other modes of manifest sexual conjunction with women, eg., where both the dreamer and the woman hold each other, kiss and such, also mean that he is sure to win because the cards, and with them the money, will want him. Since many of these motifs pertain to the domain of hunting their symbolisation of the wakeful domains of action is equivocal. This is specifically the case with the manifest conjunction with a woman. If one, after such a dream, doesn't want to go to play cards he may as well go hunting. The dream-showing has indicated that he is bound to catch a marsupial. This domain acutely articulates the immanent doubleness of sexuality in the Yagwoia life-world. For, hunting and catching game is an activity of killing, specifically shooting with arrows. In the Yagwoia language both actions--making sex and shooting with arrows are predicated by the same verb which can best be glossed--'shoot-fuck'. This is the usage for and by both men and women. Libidinal flow and its binding is always bi-valent: it is at once the libido and mortido, self-conjunctive and disjunctive. It is not surprising that, relative to context, a dream with overt sexual, especially conjunctive content can mean exactly its opposite, the dreamer's or some alter's death. (14) But by the same token, the correlate of every death is that its perpetrator remains alive. All along every mode of death is but the perpetration of the generative flow, without end. (15)

It was in the period of the recurrence of the wild fowl dream-visions that QANG extracted the money with which he paid for his favourite wife Tilm. Then sometime in the early eighties his vision became decisively altered. (16) One night he was dreaming again that he was taking numerous wild fowl eggs but then the following happened.

Dream 3.1.

 I was taking eggs, putting them on the bark-cape when I saw my
 (classificatory) father QANguqulyil7 come behind my back. I saw him
 thus and he went straight to those eggs in the nest that I uncovered
 and covered them all with the leaf-trash that I previously removed
 from them. I saw this man, his face, as he came behind me and I
 didn't talk to him. I went (with the eggs that he already put into
 his make-shift bag) then I woke up upset.

Before I interpret this new development it is important to say that at the time the dream's outcome was very lucrative. QANG immediately went to find whether there was a game of laki going on. And sure enough he ran into a Wantikia (Baruya dialect) medical orderly who was literally loaded because he cleaned up all the other players, to the tune of about 350K. The Wantikia boasted: 'If you are a true man try to extract this money from me!' QANG said that when he heard him talking so spitefully he got angry and decided to go for him. They played dice and, in his usual way, QANG started off with small amounts till his opponent got hooked, as it was determined in his dream vision. His soul overpowered him and in the end the Wantikia's entire win came to QANG. He indeed was a true enough man to siphon out this braggart's money.

But this was also the last time that QANG had his dream vision and extracted a lot of money. His soul was depotentiated or, more accurately, his dead classificatory father's spirit, who in the dream came from his back, seized his soul and literally twisted it away from QANG's face-front to the back of the head. His soul-power manifest in the form of the recurrent vision thereby ceased including its other related dreams (pandanus-nuts, ulamana seeds). The occlusion of the soul's vision in terms of the soul's removal from the face to the back must not be understood as literally the whole of QANG's soul (kune umpne). It pertains solely to this particular power to attract money in laki. As I pointed out in two previous works (Mimica, 2003, 2006), in this sense 'soul' stands for its specific individuations qua power-objects or visions. And this is what QANG has lost.

The dream exactly articulates this alteration of the vision itself. Hitherto QANG was the one who had, each time he dreamt this particular dream, uncovered the eggs in the nest. This was his fecund source of power controlled exclusively by him, through his actions in the dream. The appearance of an alter, whom QANG recognised, changes this aspect. He undid QANG's action by covering up the eggs and this directly translates into ocular depotentiation. QANG was explicit about this; with this action of his classificatory father he no longer can see the eggs, i.e., cannot have the dream vision. The reason why he also says that his soul has been moved to the back of his head follows from the fact that in the dream he saw his malignant classificatory father sneaking up on him from his back. Ergo, the soul got pulled around the head to the back and has been held there ever since by this spirit. It is symptomatic that in the dream QANG was rather passive towards the intruder. He didn't talk to him or in any way interact with him. He just saw him doing what he did and he walked away. There is no doubt that if QANG had shouted at the intruder he might have thus overpowered him and probably regained the control over his oneiric situation. But no! he mutely walked away and has suffered the consequences ever since.

Indeed, on various occasions he told several shamans what his predicament was and they all agreed, but the attempts to get rid of the malignant presence of his classificatory father and to turn the soul back to his face didn't work. QANG has no doubts as to why this is so. Shamans are envious of his laki powers for everybody knew how much money he had managed to extract in the past. Therefore they never truly tried to do the job properly. By the same token he also never paid for any of the treatments because his attitude is that he first has to see if they had done it properly. Therefore, if he starts dreaming again the same dream he will be assured that his soul is back in place and he would pay them accordingly, otherwise no! The last treatment he had was in 1996 by his old-time lover Tily who is now (at the time of writing) also his new wife. This too didn't have any effect. As we shall see, a year later he had a dream which clearly indicated that the vision of his inexhaustible fecundity in laki may yet return. But all shamanic treatments miscarried. (18)

Now it is quite surprising to see that his loss of a soul-power was caused by his agnatic relation. Virtually all sicknesses and afflictions among the Yagwoia are caused by maternal relatives (kaneuwyo = mothers) who, as the inalienable possessors of each person's bodily flesh, will always have some reason to feel disgruntled and ill disposed towards their children. Fathers, real or classificatory, living or dead, are expected to protect their progeny. QANG averred that he didn't know why his deceased paternal relative would hold some grudge against him and emphasised that they are of two different latice segments, which is to say that as an agnate this father is distant. Be that as it may, the fact is that his agnatic paternal spirit has acutely deprived him of the access to a fecund current of the flow which interlaces men in their pursuit of laki. It may well be that this agnate had, while still alive, given some money to QANG which he didn't reciprocate (as he should have to a distant agnate) and now as a wopa ilymane (spirit of the dead) he seized the opportunity to get even with QANG by blocking his soul-vision and thus effectively blocking one mode of actualisation of his potency. (19)

Now shifting the perspective on QANG's soul-deprivation to the psycho-analytic vantage-point the following aspects have to be amplified. To the extent that his wild-fowl eggs vision articulates his deeper dynamics of feminine-maternal object relations, here manifestly transfigured into an image of the inexhaustible, impersonal autogenerative womb-zone in the world-body, the intruder is overtly a negative father image. As discussed above, the motivations for this internal object's actions are not readily apparent but it would be easy enough to see the classificatory father as an imago which exercises the activity of QANG's paternally determined super-ego. On the other hand this would be to unduly 'oedipalize' the Yagwoia egoic self whose structural dynamics is overwhelmingly ouroboric and as such pre-Oedipal in both the masculine^feminine and paternal^maternal self-differentiations.

I think that my speculation about the specific reasons for the appearance of this negative male imago in the semblance of a paternal relative is most probably correct. He is a concrete introject of the relationship between QANG and that specific person who, I have no doubts, had some unsettled score of a financial kind, and QANG knew that. It was just a matter of time before he would spring into his un/conscious as a malignant spirit. This is how conscience operates in the dynamics of the Yagwoia egoic self. Given QANG's total situation this particular spirit imago can be seen as a vehicle for QANG's more immediate and continuous experience of envious male adversaries--so many men whom he was gambling with. In this perspective the intrusion into his intra-psychic boundlessly fecund feminine region and his effective severance from it was his un/conscious response to other men who had every reason to envy him. Indeed, once in the intersubjective field of the laki engagement he would be subjected to the active projections and introjections of his own malignancy and of his opponents whose envy and desire for screwing him dead rather than him screwing them would be a dominant affective-energic undercurrent of the situation. At one point QANG's own intra-psychic domain of male objects became sufficiently stressed and disequilibrated that his un/conscious, hitherto consolidated by his omni-benevolent and protective paternal presence (dead father), yielded to an already present negative object who was waiting for his opportunity. The intruder took him by surprise so well that he made no resistance. In the dream scene his own actions simply were carried as a repetition of the well established routine dreamt so many times before. To conclude: the intra-psychic self-occlusion was due to a negative eruption from his masculine, and to be sure, homosexually toned object relations. Intra-psychically the experience was wholly real: qua the spirit imago QANG effectively became libidinally disinvested (decathected) from his treasured feminine object and it stopped appearing and narcissistically-libidinally feeding him. This was truly a loss of a marvellous object which is why he never gave up on it. Relentlessly he continued his struggle to regain it.

THE PASSIONS OF QANG'S SOUL TO REGAIN HIS LAKI-POWER

It is rather symptomatic that two dreams he had in 1992, both of which he thought might bring change in his pursuit of laki, are marked by manifest masculine phallic self-identifications and object relations within a libidinal flow which clearly indicates the dramatic depth and intensity of his strivings to regain his specifically laki-bound soul-potency.

Dream 4.

 [In this dream he was lying on a small but long tree-trunk,
 paddling with his hands like a canoe (20) in a big torrential
 river. It looked like a local river; it carried many tree-tops
 and leaves. This was a tributary of a bigger river and he was
 worried that he would be swept into it and killed. He managed to
 get into a smaller confluence of this river where the water was
 considerably calmer. He was happy to be alive.] There I saw a
 big tree staying on the side and its branches, which are like
 hands, had no leaves. Its base was hooked to the side (of the
 river bank). I pushed it strong and the swollen water took it and
 carried it away. I didn't see it any more; it went into the big
 river.

In QANG's self-understanding this was a good-enough dream with regard to laki. The critical detail is the big tree, completely without leaves and partly stuck. Its meaning is straightforward. The absent leaves represent the bank-notes. They are gone, and since QANG himself is the one who releases the tree the indication is that the money will come to him. He had the dream after a day of gambling during which he had very good cards but other men were afraid of his cards and they played only half-heartedly. In addition, without a dream he had no real power of attraction. A day before he played and lost. After this dream he was hoping that other men would play; they didn't and the dream's power was lost. Then the next day he played again and lost which disgruntled him so much that he took back some of his money by force. This kind of outburst often follows when a man experiences a succession of losses. A fight may ensue but if the amount of re-appropriated money is not very big (in QANG's case it was 20K) the peeved player will be allowed to get away with it. QANG was justifying his action by saying that other players themselves haven't got too much money and therefore they are greedy for other men's money. Besides he was old and they all were young. His momentary excess was all right; he was steadily losing money over a long period of time, sometimes in excess of two hundred kina and more in a single day. For the Yagwoia, and especially for Iwolaqa-Malyce, these are cataclysmic losses.

The dream scene and activities are entirely revealing of QANG's intra-psychic ecology: his experience of himself and his situation. The very image of him paddling on a thin long trunk in a torrential river expresses an angry welling of his libidinal-aggressive energy within which his egoic self-representation is maximally phallically determined. His whole body is identified with the tree-trunk on which he moves through the uncontrollable, violent flow of life-and-death whose force is primarily destructive. In the sector of a relatively slower effluence he encounters and releases a big tree which in the Yagwoia life-world represents archetypal male embodiment. The leaves, to the extent that they represent money, also symbolise women who are said to get shed off and fly away like leaves because they marry into other latice groups and in the

process make the wealth flow and bear children. (21) The dream manifests QANG's ego in a domain of the unbidden riverine flow which carries all trees and leaves (men and their money) indiscriminately and irreversibly. He is alone and in mortal danger and for that reason he is maximally self-possessed in his generic male--phallic--self-identification. He has no other firm grounds to stand on and erect himself upon or plant himself into it. To the extent that in its aqueousness the flow is feminine simultaneously the linearity of the riverine course accounts for its phallic determination. A comparison with his wife's intra-psychic ecology (Mimica, 2006:39-44, dream 1) is instructive precisely because of the radical difference in the character of the flow. Hers was predominantly contained by a canal and its source was him. His is a boiling, wholly impersonal and uncontrollable effluence in the world-body. The only controlling agency is from the ego supported by his own phallic power whereby he can attempt to bind to himself some of other men's powers. In this regard I believe that QANG woke up from this typhonic dream rather self-empowered. Here the intra-psychic flow also has the meaning of the deadly waters of birth. (22)

This intra-psychic oneiric sell-representation also expresses the fundamental factical determination of the Yagwoia body-image. The actual physical environment of the Yagwoia self is not at all different from the one lived in the dream. Every Yagwoia projects his/herself into this steep, mountainous, muddy, riverine environment all the time as s/he moves from the homestead to the garden, or, for man, is hunting game in the forest. The possibility of falling into the fiver and getting injured or killed is continuous--each time one has to get from one bank to another, over a rickety bridge, hopping from boulder to boulder and wading through the flow. The intense world-elemental cathexis of environment is an irreducible substratum of the Yagwoia body-image and the world-body dimension reverberates ceaselessly in all affective streamings and modulations within the depths of the Yagwoia egoic self. In this perspective the more fully objectified Yagwoia notions about, and practices pertaining to human embodiment (for instance in curing, whereby it is articulated as a microcosmic image of and synergic with the macro-cosmic world-body) are grounded in the depths of the individual un/conscious self and its body-image. (23)

The world-body continuously demands from humans a relentless corporeal self-application in every endeavour. Whether dreaming or wide awake a person always has to make an effort in order to realise his/her desires and appetites because the world-body, as a generative flow of life-and-death offers its nourishment solely on the condition that it is actively sought for. Yagwoia were and still are swidden cultivators and hunters. In their existential synergy with the world neither plants nor game (or cash crops) wait for humans to avail themselves of them as if they were on store-shelves. Humans plant and hunt with simple tools--digging sticks, axes, spades, knives, bows and arrows--all of which are direct extensions and translations of human embodiment and muscle-power into transformative-assimilative action, and only on that basis do they come to eat the world-body. Here is underscored in a nut-shell the ontological necessity of human bodily self-projection into and assimilation of the world as fundamentally co-substantial and homomorphic with human bodiliness. QANG's pursuit of a self-conjunction with an object of laki stems from this fundamental intentional orientation to the world-body and its flow. As a matter of fact this is a pursuit no different from hunting. His relation to the flow embedded in other men and their money is the same as to prey in the forest. The two domains, laki and hunting, are entirely interchangeable.

Another dream which he dreamt about a week later still retains the central image of the riverine flow. But the human element is here represented without symbolic displacements. This has to do with the heightened significance of the person who appeared to QANG in the dream.

Dream 5.

 I saw this man, the national member ZA. He tied into a bundle
 numerous spoons wrapped in a plastic bag. He carried them thus and
 he came from underneath a swollen (torrential) fiver same as this
 ship they call submarine. Came (emerged) thus from under (the
 surface of the torrential) fiver like the ship submarine, and he
 gave this bundle of spoons to many men (people). I was looking at
 him and I told him thus: "We are not willing to vote for you, we
 are not satisfied with you!" I said so and this national member
 didn't reply to me. His head went down and he didn't talk back to
 me. He went back to this same fiver from which he came, and he went
 underneath again. I saw him like that; that is all, there isn't
 much else (in this dream).

The 'submarine' national member ZA was for many years the parliamentary member for the Op-Wona Open Electorate. He was actually from another province but he worked for well over ten years as a medical orderly at the Mrw station. QANG became friendly with him during his appointment as a government interpreter. When ZA went into politics QANG became his chief 'campaign organiser' in the Iwolaqa-Malycaane area where he exercised a great deal of influence. The member always reciprocated well and frequently paid the school fees for his eldest son, including when he began to study in town at a technical college. In this regard the member has had a strong presence in QANG's un/conscious. At the time he had this dream QANG held a grudge against him since he had expected a major payment from the member for the years of service that he rendered to him. The figure he had in mind was K1500. QANG hadn't received any of this money and he went to Acaqopi ready for a major confrontation with the member, but this too didn't happen as he left before he arrived there. He did leave a message for QANG to the effect that he would like to invite him to Goroka. This considerably deflated QANG's grudge and he felt pleased that the member explicitly asked about him and showed his care. Overall QANG is ambivalent about him: he often said that ZA was an extremely 'good man'--because he is a giver-provider and has an aura of a man whose monetary resources are inexhaustible.

ZA was rather highly regarded because he tried hard to distribute his money throughout his electorate as evenly as possible. But because of his original association with Mrw area he had a special attachment to this sector, including the Iwolaqa-Malycaane. Overall, any member is pre-dominantly cast as paternal figure who feeds his needy people primarily defined as a collectivity of 'mothers-fathers-and-children' who inhabit the bush. The local configuration of the institution of the state is irreducibly determined by the field of familial-kinship projections and symbiotic dependencies. Thus on ZA's campaign poster he was named 'Papa' (father); a blurb in Tok Pisin said that he is a man who cares for all the peoples of the Mrw-Op-Wona electorate and truly brings them development and service.

Now in the period of the dream the member had already been in the Iwolaqa-Malycaane area several times before. This was a pre-election period. He first brought a lot of money which was paid out to all the people who worked on several public projects (a road and a few bridges). On that occasion a stream of people went to the Acaqopi air-strip to receive the money from the member. He told them then that he was going to come back again bringing more money for two other projects: for the youth sports (basket-ball, volleyball, foot-ball, and such) and for the finalisation of an air-strip built by a small and remote group of Simbari speakers in a place called Yau'wye.

In his appraisal of the dream QANG said that it was this specific money-delivery that he saw in the dream; he didn't mention the money that he expected for himself which is what primarily determines his dream. (24) But he decided that 'half-of-its-meaning' was about winning money on laki. For him the following were symptomatic showings. The bundle of spoons that the submarine member carried and gave to other men represents the cards, specifically their numerical values. Although tied into a bundle, being a plurality of individual things, they are numerous and as such carry the meaning of numbers and cards. QANG said that the member didn't give the bundle to him but to other men. Therefore he couldn't untie them and count them. (25) What counts, though, is that they were numerous and that they came from a man who unquestionably is loaded with wealth which, as a rule, he dispenses to other men. The spoons, then, mean both the high (strong) number cards and correspondingly a plenitude of money. (26) As for the detail of the member emerging from the torrential river it meant that the man (opponent in the game) wouldn't be able to keep his cards/money in his grip. The water, which also pictures his bodily sweat, washes away the cards/money from his hands and transfers them to the ego of the dreamer. To the extent that in the dream QANG overpowered the member who didn't reply to his remark that he 'wasn't satisfied with him and therefore no vote!', and silently returned to the torrential waters, it is self-evident that QANG would overpower his opponent(s). The idea of the torrential stream also picturing the bodily sweat would suggest that the power of the ego's soul over his alter would cause him to sweat and this would make him yield; forfeit his grip over his flow and cards/money. Alas there were no willing players that time in Acaqopi (May, 1992) and the power of QANG's dream vision came to nothing.

Intra-psychically this dream manifests the following dynamics. In terms of the general libidinal-energic dynamism the ecology is the same as in the previous dream (4). The flow is articulating much the same wrathful welling of a truly primordial destructive force. It is significant that QANG couldn't identify the river whereas in the previous dream he likened the flow to two local rivers. This suggests that in the present situation the impersonality of the intra-psychic depth is heightened. The violent flow is beyond the scope of the ego's self-recognition; what is familiar is just the general physiognomy of the local riverine milieu. But beyond that this is an unknown territory within the ego's un/conscious. However, by contrast to the previous dream the ego's situation is now radically altered. Before he was in the midst of the torrential flow now he is on the terra firma of the riverbank. There is no immediate danger for him nor is he phallically engaged with the flow to manoeuvre his way through it in order to deliver himself from what would be certain death. Presently he is entirely ocularly engaged with the flow from which emerges, like a submarine, a wholly human alter whom he not only knows but with whom he has a long standing relationship of co-dependence and, at the time of the dream, equally balanced power for the alter owes him a lot of money. Locally the member depends on QANG to sustain his popularity more so than any other Iwolaqa Malyce man. His inexhaustible monetary power-flow is assumed as a matter of course. That is what a member is for.

In the egoic milieu of QANG's un/conscious the member gravitates towards the position of an alter-self. This is reinforced by his financial care for QANG's son at school in town. In the dream this alter is intended as one who abides by the ego's own desires especially since he owes QANG a lot of money. And this is manifestly so since the submarine member is under the full command of the dreamer. The latter dominates the former. Now the perceptual characteristic of the member's actual mode of movement and transportation in the world-body is celestial rather than aquatic. In wakeful reality he always arrives in and leaves the area by aeroplane or helicopter. In the cosmography of the dream, however, his elemental determination is aquatic in no uncertain terms: he is fully submersible. The reason for this is twofold. The dream in the first place is articulating the dreamer's imaginal endo-psychic situation and as such is a construct of a pre-set, self-centric assimilative psycho-dynamic matrix of internal objects that have been already articulated in previous dreams and phantasies. Each dream is a particular expression of the total un/conscious configuration of the egoic self. From this structural endo-psychic perspective it is easy to see that the submersible member is a transfigured variant of a more latent male object which in the previous dream was concretely expressed by the archetypal imago of the big tree without leaves. It was partly hooked to the river bank and QANG released it. There too, he exercised control over it. I am here emphasising the fact that dream noesis is always primarily the work of the endo-psychic dynamics of imaginal noetic activity which uses and assimilates perceptual objects but is not simply reducible to them.

Nevertheless, a concrete external aspect of QANG's experience did directly condition this oneiric rendition of the national member as a submersible. A voting-poster featuring the picture of ZA was placed on the face of a boulder in the middle of a river tributary which anybody could see when going to the Acaqopi air-strip. QANG saw it too and I think that his attention to it might have been amplified by my decision to take a photograph of this extraordinary scene. I thought to myself--here in a remote corner of New Guinea, to put a poster on a boulder in the middle of a wild fiver is perfectly in concord with the local realities of existence, including electioneering, but it surely gives a new dimension to the well-known line that 'bill-posters will be prosecuted'. In this factual scene the image of the 'memba' is in the midst of a wild stream, and as such it is the actual perceptual source of QANG's dream imago of the submersible member as his alter.

On the other hand precisely as QANG's internal object, the member belongs to the aquatic milieu because, as we saw in the previous dream, this is where QANG himself was, glued to and paddling on his life-supporting tree-trunk. From one dream to the other the ego swapped place with his alter who is in the position of the object of his desire. But the reason why in QANG's un/conscious they both are in the river of life-and-death is intrinsic to QANG's factical determination as the man who is looking for other men's libidinal power-and-money immanent in the universal flow within the world-body. In his previous dream the ego braved the violent flow and made a tentative hook-up with the desired object--a generic-archetypal male embodiment manifested in the imago of the tree. He wanted to capture its power-money but in wakefulness the dream's potential went amiss. In this perspective the desired male object is nothing but the desired optimal--indeed--the ideal mode of oneself--to be possessed of money and the power of the flow. In the new dream this generic male object, the desired mode of oneself, is most appropriately projected into the national member who has already been introjected as his alter and is truly imbued with the desired qualities--power and money which are at least in part due to the men like QANG who is ZA's man in the field. As a member ZA is literally loaded. He is of the flow; this is why he comes out of and goes back into it without any indication that this would endanger his life. It would be an inappropriate analogy to say that the member is like a fish in water. In terms of the Yagwoia imaginal sub-stratum of their life-world he is like wild forest spirits who occupy all, including the sub-aqueous, life-spaces. The member is possessed of the flow's power in the way that QANG will never be. He can only steer through the flow by the bare phallic power of his body risking in the process his life and limb trying to catch and bind some of the power of the effluence within the world-body. This is perfectly understandable. As I said above his relation to the flow embedded in other men is the same as to prey in the forest. But his predicament is that he used to possess his privileged boundless access to the flow from which he has been torn away and he is trying to regain it. Accordingly, with regard to this specific streaming of his desires, in his endo-psychic relation to the flow he only generates wrath and destructiveness but no capture and fulfilment. What is quite clear from these dreams is that the flow, as mediated by his internal male object relations, remains in a frustratingly contingent relation to him. The wild-fowl vision was a relation with his contra-sexual object and if he were going to recapture his soul-power it would have to be in the feminine domain of his un/conscious self. This became a very real possibility after a dream he had in 1997.

THE POTENTIAL RENEWAL OF QANG'S SOUL'S LAKI-POWER

At the time he was sick which explains the intensity and a fundamentally self-regenerative determination of the libidinal dynamics of the dream experience. With his favourite wife Tilm he was sleeping at HYaq's cooking shelter. He is a shaman who was supposed to extract the sickness from QANG's body.

Dream 6.

 At night I was sleeping thus when I saw a misis (white woman)
 coming. Coming now and she tells me: "You take off my clothes--hold
 now my breasts". I took her clothes off and the woman--she is
 sitting on the top of me while I am holding her two breasts. They
 are truly firm, I am holding her thus and she tells me: "You
 mustn't let go off (my breasts), you must hold me strong and hold
 me!". I am holding her, didn't let go off her. I was holding,
 holding, holding and the misis' breasts were terrifically firm.
 They gave me a kick on my hands (sexual excitement). And I am
 feeling sweet (delicious) exactly as I hold her breasts. I was
 delighted--my kune umpne (thought soul) was delighted for my
 holding the breasts of a misis. I am thinking--"Aiy--sorry!
 Misis--a nice one!". Aiy!--I am thinking "what am I going to do to
 this misis?! Shall I shoot (fuck) her or what shall I do?". And she
 tells me "You mustn't let go of my breasts. You hold them!" I am
 thinking--"I am truly holding her body". No! I got (woke) up
 startled--looking: I dreamt.

 Having woken up he immediately engaged his wife Tilm whom he
 calls "mother": "h/ilmaye-(qw)oqwane! (her endearment name) Sorry
 my mother, I am sick, truly not good, and I saw a beautiful dream".
 I said: "I held the breasts of a misis. I held them so well that I
 nearly urinated", I told (my) mother thus. And (my) mother woke up
 and said: "Sorry h/iwoye ! (his endearment name). (With that dream)
 you are able to win some money except that the sickness damaged you
 so bad". She told me thus now, I said: "It's all right. (If) some
 other time I dream (again) I can play".

In the ensuing discussion QANG declared that if it wasn't for his sickness with this kind of dream-showing he would have taken one Somari (27) and immediately gone to play cards. He was definite about winning--"I would hold picture-numbers only (i.e., the figures Queen, Jack, King); no way I would hold numbers like 10 or 9 or 8, 7 or what kind of number. (I would be) holding pictures only because--I saw the misis, her picture I saw (i.e., the Queen and qua this figure all other picture-cards). Commenting on the intensity of the conjunction with her he said: "I was thinking (in the dream) thus "Shall I take off her pants, shall I fuck her or?" She said: "You hold me (by the) breasts!" and I was holding on, holding on--go, go, go--I nearly urinated". When I asked him whether he actually ejaculated he said: "No! I didn't spill my semen; I didn't truly urinate. I was feeling that. I thought--I am looking with my eyes exactly (it is wakefully-perceptually real). But I only dreamt that!" Then as an anticipation he said "I think this kune umpne (thought soul) of mine wants to come back or what!? I am thinking thus". That is, he is wondering whether his laki soul (the wild-fowl vision) will return thereby bringing back his power over the flow of wealth and the souls of other men.

It will be observed that the immediate evaluation of the experience by both himself and his wife was in terms of the desire for winning laki. The intense and manifest erotic quality was totally acknowledged. QANG gave no impression that the powerful erotic content would cause his wife to be jealous of her husband's nocturnal sexual exploit. Undoubtedly this was facilitated by the identity of the woman--she was a wild forest spirit who assumed the semblance of an unknown white woman. If she were a known local woman this might be more problematic and QANG might have been slightly reluctant to report the detail to his wife or, perhaps, would have suppressed her identity and made her unknown. The point is that his favourite wife immediately responded to his dream in the register of his laki seeking self-fulfilment. But she might have also understood it as a sure sign that he would catch a marsupial, specifically nama/t/'nye (tree kangaroo) which in the Yagwoia life-world is identified with the white man. (28) In this regard she valued his laki power as on a par with his hunting abilities for, as every Yagwoia woman, she too desires and expects from her man to provide her with game meat (namdje). What the man catches in the forest is an alimentary delight for his wives and children. Indeed the most basic mode of a woman's devaluation of her man is to spite him for not being man enough to bring meat into the house. This was, for instance, PC's predicament whose soul was radically disempowered so that he lost the ability to have dream showings propitious for hunting. His wives spitefully abused him now as a rubbish man and he admitted to it because he no longer could hunt successfully as he used to. With Tilm there was also an intrinsic connection with her husband's laki power since her bride-price came from the money he won while in Mrw.

The dream itself, as well as QANG's and Tilm's understanding of it, shows that the latent core of his laki soul-power, originally made manifest and accessible through the 'wild fowl eggs' dream vision, is his contra-sexual conjunction within the feminine domain of his egoic self. The endo-psychic dynamics at work in this dream deserves a more involved exegesis. For QANG the fact that he was sick and enfeebled when he had this dream was incidental. This was the factor which prevented him from bringing the showing to its actualisation in wakefulness by not being able to go and play cards. Yet I think that his sickness was the primary reason why his un/conscious self had acted in this way. The dream is primarily an auto-ameliorative response to the organismic stress and enfeeblement caused by his sickness. In terms of the internal object-dynamics, QANG is attended to by his feminine imago which has at once displaced and replicated his primordial relationship with the maternal body. In this regard the dream image is motivated and structured by the same internal narcissistic gestalt as the one he experienced when, as a little nose-pierced novice separated from his mother, he was brought into the conjunction with a stunningly beautiful spirit woman who told him that she liked and wanted him (Mimica, 2006:48-52, dream 2). In the present version the imago's superlative beauty and libidinal sexual attraction are articulated by the factor of her being white and wearing clothes. The latter is an element which has modified the typical appearance of the Yagwoia women who now more commonly, but not exclusively, wear blouses and skirts. They too have become more akin to misis. The imago's whiteness also identifies her as a hyaqaye ilymaapala (wild forest spirit woman). What is symptomatic in QANG's intra-psychic relation with his feminine self-object is that she is the one who tells him what to do. She voices her desires for him and acts upon him which in turn induces his response to her, according to her directives. This internal passive-activity is indicative of the primal dynamics of the mother-infant relationship where the former has the upper hand in initiating and exacting both her own and the infant's intentional streamings. She is the conduit for and the metaboliser of the infant's own psychic effluence. This is also the structuring context of the maternally determined pre-Oedipal super-ego.

In the dream the white woman tells him to undress her and hold her breasts. With the emphasis on the breasts their conjunction has an overtly maternal and oral (sucking) toning but, to be sure, these breasts are fully phallicised. In the Yagwoia life-world firm or flaccid, male or female, breast is phallic as is the whole body, including the umbilical cord. Historically, this metamorphosis of the phallus was fully actualised and accomplished in the male-exclusive practice of fellatio. In the dream not only are the breasts terrifically firm but they give QANG a full phallic boost as the 'kick' that he felt in his hands. His genital response is transposed to his hands and the overall libidinal streaming is virtually orgasmic (he felt like urinating) although he didn't ejaculate. Nevertheless--and this is symptomatic of QANG's endo-psychic maternal super-ego activity--he abides by the woman's stipulation. He thought whether to shoot (fuck) her but, as she commanded, he remained in the grip of her breasts, hanging on as he said, until he woke up realising that he was doing this while dreaming.

What makes this endo-psychic experience a conjunction with the seemingly contra-sexual alter rather than an auto-sexual conjunction with one's own contra-sexual double-self is the fact that the white woman imago is his inner alter to a greater degree than the spirit woman in his original initiation dream-vision where she overtly identified herself with him so that all other women would, from then on, be attracted to him. But the legacy of that original auto-contra-sexual conjunction is evident here, for the white woman came to him and declared her attraction to him. It is precisely because of this auto-sexual, narcissistic dynamics in which libidinal self-circuity is mediated by phallic breasts (in which the genital and the oral zones are fused) that the dream can be characterised as an endo-psychic auto-generative experience. Qua his contra-sexual imago QANG's un/conscious was energising his enfeebled body by his own libido. Here, then, is made manifest his pre-Oedipal ouroboric core differentiated into a syzygious conjunction of the male and female components (m^f) which were shaped by and bear the imprints of the primal object relations, the mother-child (M^Ch) self-unity (Fig. 7).

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The mobilisation of this endo-psychic matrix in a crisis situation such as sickness is entirely concordant with the Yagwoia psycho-somatic dynamics where the generation and sustenance of health is entirely dependant on the auto-reparative powers and resources of the body. In its psycho-somatic function the ouroboric dynamics of the un/conscious is equivalent to the auto-immune system. It is the self's auto-generative response to the attack on its body. In the first part of this study (op.cit. p.41) I pointed out that for the Yagwoia sickness is viewed and lived as a negative sexual conjunction, caused by an intruding napalye (sickness object), which effects a small death. The curative process involves expulsion and positive self-conjunction which generates (vitalises) rather than dissolves the body. To put it in an apposite ouroboric register: the life-death process in any mode is a ceaseless metabolic activity. Sickness-and-death are its katabolic modes (negative eating and sex), health-and-life anabolic (positive eating and sex). QANG's dream is a testimony to his un/conscious intra-psychic 'anabolic' self-generation.

But for QANG this internal conjunction was a new impetus for hoping that he will repossess his soul's visionary power to attract those streamings which channel the current of laki within the total flow of the world-body. In psychodynamic terms the endo-psychic feminine object-conjunction could undo the occlusion brought about by his malignant male object, the spirit of his classificatory father which pulled his soul to the back of the head. It is easy to see how the image of the maternal white woman and the grip on her breasts thematically reverberates with and can transfigure into a new version of the image of the wild fowl's eggs and other related images such as the pandanus nuts, red ulamana seeds in a pouch, or money-leaves. In his dream QANG has made a direct connection with the intra-psychic domain of his feminine bodily generativity. (29) Given the acute overtness and intensity of the sexual conjunction with his feminine self-object, this experience may well initiate a new bout of constructive cathexes of self-representations featuring dream scenarios akin to the ones he had before. In such productions of his un/conscious the dreaming ego can successfully renew his narcissistic fulfilment as the powerful attractor and extractor of other men's libidinal capture of the flow of laki. In the perspective of this dream it becomes quite obvious that success in all undertakings--from hunting, sexual exploits, warfare, to wealth acquisition and laki--has the irreducible un/conscious meaning of self-generation. The last time I spoke to QANG about his laki soul-power (December 1999 to January 2000) he was still expecting a shaman to do the critical work, namely to remove the malignant spirit presence and to place his soul back in front of his face. In the meantime his conjugal domestic intersubjective situation became altered since his favourite wife Tilm died at the end of the great drought which lasted from March 1997 to April 1998. It is this alteration in his intra-psychic feminine dimension that I will examine in the third paper of this trilogy.

APPENDIX: Dream 5, Footnote 26

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Extracts from this work were presented in the departmental seminars at the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Macquarie, and the Australian National University. I thank all the participants in these seminars for their critical comments. I am also grateful to the participants in the psychoanalytic seminar organised by Olga Katchan of the Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, for their critical comments. Special thanks are due to Roy Wagner of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Borut Telban of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Eric Hirsch of Brunel University, London, an anonymous reviewer for Oceania, and my wife Ute Eickelkamp for their critical assessment of and comments on the paper. I am especially thankful to Neil Maclean and the Oceania staff at Sydney for their editorial and technical work which brought this paper to its final form. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council (ARC) which enabled me to continue with my research in Papua New Guinea for several years. I am especially grateful to The Ann and Erlo Van Waveren Foundation of New York whose grant allowed me to continue my field research on Yagwoia shamanism after my ARC grant ended. Finally, I am grateful to the Yagwoia people, especially Iqwaye and Iwolaqa-Malyce for letting me explore their life-world, which is to say, themselves as they are inside and outside the circuity of their macrocosmic Self (Imacoqwa). Among them, my heart-felt gratitude goes to Hiwoye, Wopaye, and Qwace u/ngwatanye.

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Jadran Mimica

University of Sydney

NOTES

(1.) For the explication of these concepts, see Mimica 2006:30-32.

(2.) It is useful to refer to them as card/dice-slingers, by analogy to gun-slingers, which purports to convey the Yagwoia men's overall libidinal-aggressive attitude and expressive style frequently manifest in gambling. By and large, Yagwoia women do not play laki. Within the Yagwoia region, starting in the early nineties I have seen only a few younger women sporadically engaging in it. On the other hand it may well be the case that when they go to live with their husbands at coastal plantations and townships more Yagwoia women take up laki. Some may become addicted to it as, for instance, a woman who first went with her much older classificatory son to Rabaul. There she married a Pangia (Southern Highlands) man whom she reportedly totally dominates and spends all his earnings on gambling. On this account, the Pangia justifies his refusal to pay both the bride-price and the child-payments to her Yagwoia close agnates who in turn have been chasing him through the islands and the highlands of PNG for the last 15 years in order to extract from him their share of her womb-generativity; for the Pangia got out of her several children. To the best of my knowledge, the precedence for this development was set in the early eighties by a woman from the Simbu Province married to an Iwolaqa-Malyce man who lived outside of his home area in a township. The two came to visit his village and within days she became a sort of a 'wonder-woman' who engaged with the local men in laki and literally drained them of their money. The news about this Simbu woman that was winning over all men in their game spread fast into other Yagwoia territorial groups.

(3.) The names for these two types of chance game are derived from Tok Pisin: kas (cards) and satu (dice). For accounts of gambling in other PNG life-worlds, see Laycock, 1966, 1967; Brandewie, 1967; Maclean, 1984; Zimmer, 1986, 1987; Sexton, 1987.

(4.) Regularly or frequently he or she has such and such a dream vision or a series of them, all thematically interrelated, but it is usually one or two that are the centre-piece of what I can rightly call the thematic complex, and they sustain this particular power of the person's soul.

(5.) Some of the dream motifs are said to apply to lottery which is not available locally but the Yagwoia know about it from their experiences of life in towns.

(6.) They are round and have the size of an average medallion.

(7.) Not in the sense of their perceptual-significative (semiotic) qualities and resemblances, but because these are themselves the quiddities of a dynamic substantial continuity and identity between these different things. And they are not objects made of inert 'materiality' but are organic generative substantiality all of which are substantially equivalent to the generative human corporeality and its macro-cosmic embodiment, the world-body. Language too is but a current within the same energic-organic substantial flow. It is not an ontologically separated noetic sphere of activity.

(8.) What is at work here is the same un/conscious dynamic dialectics of infinite multiplicity of content and the finite/bound container illustrated by the well known mythopoeic image of the magic cooking pot which cooks (generates) an infinite amount of porridge. Such concrete mythopoeic images are a manifestation of the more general un/conscious noetic dialectical structuration of One^Many which at the level of archetypal representations is commonly articulated in the schematic dynamics of container^contained.

(9.) As in aa-p-ale (woman)> aa-ma-n-ce (old woman)> aa-l-ye (water). In fact all vowels in the Yagwoia language are categorically female quiddity, some of which have additional male significative value. Consonants are male.

(10.) This lexeme belongs to a cluster of words and their referents which contain and present an array of avian and reptilian manifestations of the cosmic creator and his female self.

(11.) The related images of pandanus nuts and wallet with the zipper respectively give the following bodily sexual values. The pandanus is generically phallic male body but its nuts are phallic egg-like children and in that way continuous with the feminine quiddity. The wallet/pouch is like the more traditional net-bag, the uterine container; the zipper is its vaginal slit that can be opened and closed (see also Mimica, 2006:38 and footnote 34, p.55).

(12.) A dream he bad many years later (1997) will reveal this explicitly. The dynamics of fowl-eggs dream is latently motivated by a deeper self-object circuity structured as an auto-conjunction with his feminine self-component.

(13.) This is an expression of the narcissistic ideal of the Yagwoia maleness in its homosexual purity. The young male initiate himself should not have attraction for women, but women in particular will be irresistibly drawn to him precisely because he embodies the semen of his older brothers, still untouched by contact with women. In this male self-image homosexuality affirms the superiority over heterosexuality precisely because, overtly, it is outside of and above the sphere of the relations with women and their craving for the pure ('virginal') mode of the male generative flow. This is why women are so attracted to this embodiment of the all-male flow. He is the gravitational pull for her.

(14.) This is especially true of overt homosexual dreams, i.e., male dreamer having sex with a man. Many such dreams were seized upon as forecasting homicide of enemies and therefore were taken as the pretext for launching homicidal forays into the enemy territories, either by a group or a solo warrior-killer.

(15.) The irreducible ontological determination of the flow as the ceaselessly self-totalising, generative flowing of life-death becomes intelligible solely when one knows its primary energic constitution in the substantiality of the sun and moon responsible for every modality of the flow within the world-body.

(16.) This happened while he was still working in Mrw as a government interpreter.

(17.) This was not his true father who has appeared to him since he was a child (Mimica, 2006:46-47). This man was from a different segment of QANG's latice. He died in a self-caused accident, decapitated by a boulder (see Mimica, 1996).

(18.) In January-2000 he was told by a young shaman that be would try to expel the spirit and put back his soul but this also didn't eventuate. QANG was adamant that he alone cannot regain his soul-power. This has to be done by a shaman. Due to his dream-powers and knowledge be can only tell the shaman what his problem is but he cannot undo his predicament.

(19.) There was one good enough reason for this agnate to harbour a grudge. Originally QANG's first wife was marked for him but she ended up marrying QANG.

(20.) There are no canoes among the Yagwoia. This is an object they got to know when they began to work as indentured labourers on coastal plantations,

(21.) The equation leaves =money=bank-notes has a wide extension. In the Yagwoia the word iquye = leaf is now used as a generic term for paper-money as well as for all paper, especially book-leaves and writing paper. Correspondingly, if a person dreams of a book=leaves it means that s/he will get money. As a bank-note denomination iquye (leaf) specifically denotes 2.00K which has green colour. As a life form, leaf also subsumes other small plants and grasses which in a given context may be seen to actually represent money. A masterpiece of this projection came from my informant Taqalyce who confided to me that he figured out the true meaning of the Biblical story of Noah that the missionary told them. He said that when the bird sent by Noah to find land came back it carried in its beak some grass. But, Taqalyce proudly pointed out, this is what the missionary said because he didn't want to disclose the truth. And the truth is that the bird brought back a bank note (which is why Noah was so delighted).

(22.) This will he explicitly shown in dream 7, Part III.

(23.) This 'ultimate gestalt of all human experiences' (Schilder: 1976:viii) is comprised of interfused praxic, parental, principally maternal, and world-elemental, layerings within a psycho-sexual matrix which, as shown here, is itself structured by ouroboric archetypal dynamics.

(24.) The reason I know this is because I wrote a letter to the member dictated to me by QANG in which he detailed all the services he had rendered and the amount of money he wanted to be paid for his work. The latter never reached the member since it was destroyed by QANG's two affines who were supposed to deliver it. They figured that the letter might put the member off and in consequence he might withhold the money that he had promised to Iwolaqa-Malyce.

(25.) Here is also implied the meaning of QANG's investment in the member; he expected a payment for himself but the money he brought he gave to other men.

(26.) Although they are oral instruments there seems to be no connection between the spoons and some such idea as 'spoon-feeding' or 'being born with a spoon in his mouth'. In so far as there is an active connection between spoon-mouth-food-money-cards underlying the formation of this image it is weak. The bundle of numerous spoons relates to cards because of the association with numbers. But the bundle also seems to be associated with the images of sword and sceptre in the figures of Jack and King. In some cards (it seems of German manufacture) Jack is pictured with a weapon which combines axe-blade and sharp spear tip. By contrast Queen holds a flower which relates to a well established Yagwoia oneiric equation, 'flowers=good/strong cards'. To see flowers in dream means that one will attract good cards. Flowers specifically mean a diversity of shiny luminosity which is what 'colour' as a generic category is. Simultaneously, flowers (and all sorts of other vegetal forms, including grasses) are females and are used as such as the female endearment names. Therefore, flowers as a multiplicity of 'diverse shiny colours' picture simultaneously sexual attraction of cards, and primarily of the relatively colourful figures King, Jack, and Queen which are the strongest cards (see the illustrations in the Appendix). Parenthetically, some Yagwoia speakers like QANG tend to use the term baiynet (from bayonet) for the kind of knife exemplified in the pictures of King and Jack. However, the perceptual (conscious and subliminal) identifications and assimilations of this pictorial object by any given person is subject to indeterminate interpretations and fluctuating subliminal transfigurations. For instance, when I asked one avid player about this figuration he identified it as a sort of covering of Jack's hair.

(27.) 50 Kina bank note called thus because it features the picture of the founding father of PNG, the first prime minister Michael Somare.

(28.) Women's hair is used in preparation of 'magic' feed for bunting dogs. The idea is that women attract men's penis (arrow) and, because of their promiscuous sexuality, more than one. But the Yagwoia hold that white women are far more promiscuous than local women and therefore regard their hair as a more potent ingredient. The most desirable hair is the one obtained from white prostitutes thought to be incalculably potent attractors because of numerous men's penes that found way into their bodies. On this basis one can appreciate the excitement of QANG and his wife that in the dream he held a white woman's breasts.

(29.) Fig. 7 gives a synopsis of all manifest local dream images and their endo-psychic equivalence and ouroboric determination.