Dreamtime (also dream time, dream-time) is a term for a pantheist religio-cultural system of Australian Aboriginal mythology, written about by anthropologist A. P. Elkin in 1938 and popularised by anthropologist William Edward Hanley Stanner and others from the 1970s. The Dreaming represents many Aboriginal concepts of "time out of time," or "everywhen," when the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. They were often distinct from "gods" as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped, but only revered.