In what language do you dream? I dream in English. A person from the central desert of Australia may dream in Ngaanyatjarra. A person from Berlin may dream in German.
This question was raised in a very challenging book by Richard Trudgen called “Why Warriors Lie Down and Die” in which Trudgen explores why so many Yolngu people in Arnhem Land are dependent on welfare.
One of the ideas put forward by Trudgen is that government workers, missionaries, health workers, policemen and others used their own language, and their own cultural understandings to try to get the Yolngu people to adopt certain practices that they believed would help them to live a better life.
The problem, Trudgen said, was that these people did not talk to the Yolngu people in the language in which they dreamed.
One of the first steps in achieving person-centredness, I discussed in my last blog, was having an individual approach to people. That means learning to speak to people in their dreaming language.
I’m not just talking about language in terms of the words themselves, but recognising where people come from in terms of their culture, their background, their personality and their interests.
Sometimes we present programmes or ideas as though people were all the same and all they need to do is accept the programme or idea as we have presented it. We then get upset when people react differently to what we expect. In their dreaming language they have heard our message very differently from the way we were presenting it in our dreaming language.
Can you suggest some ways in which we can hear people better in order to be more person-centred?
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