Dreamtime (also dream time, dream-time) is a term for the animist framework and symbol system of Australian Aboriginal mythology, introduced by A. P. Elkin in 1938 and popularised by William Edward Hanley Stanner and others from the 1970s for a concept of "time out of time", or "everywhen", inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities, but not considered "gods" as they do not control the material world and are not worshipped.