Funded by: The Bial Foundation

Date: August 2023 - August 2025

Amount Awarded: 55,000 Euros

Project Team: Associate Professor Natasha Tassell-Matamua, Professor Rangi Matamua, Dr Rosie Gibson

Across time and cultures, humans have been fascinated by the influence of the moon on a range of phenomena. Testimony of the link between the lunar cycles and the natural world, as well as links with human physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being, can be dated back to Assyrian and Babylonian mythology. While popular fascination with the moon has been sustained since these early beginnings, contemporary scholarly interest in lunar phase influences is limited, but growing. Many Indigenous cultures have long held beliefs about the importance and value of sleep and dreams. For many, the differentiation between the sleep and waking state, in terms of conscious awareness, is a mere technicality.

The world of sleep and therefore of dreams, and the world of waking life exist on a continuum of the same conscious reality, which is spiritual by nature. Because of this, dreams hold a position in the cosmic flow of knowledge, serving as special states (or some may prefer the term ‘altered states’) of conscious receptivity that form an important component of many Indigenous knowledge systems as special modes of knowledge acquisition.

This project seeks to explore the correlation between lunar phases, sleep, and dreaming. Rather than rely exclusively on Westernised understandings about the lunar phases and their influence on sleep and dreaming, our transdisciplinary study will innovatively employ Indigenous Māori understandings of maramataka (lunar phases) and combine these with objective sleep pattern data and qualitative dream narratives, thus allowing new theorisations and understandings about the spiritual pertinence of the relationship between the moon cycle, sleep and dreaming, to be made.