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Bogotá Dreaming: Premonitions, Nightmares, and Violence's Impossibility

Andrés Romero

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology September 1, 2026 DOI: 10.1111/jlca.70055 (opens in new tab)

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Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Ethnography Peer reviewed
Population People in Bogotá's downtown drug markets (ollas) and rehab centers (patios), including Guillermo, a man in his forties
Duration Twenty-one months of fieldwork
Topics Dreaming
Key findings Argues that dreams are co-constructed worlds where the dead and other forces act upon dreamers, and that premonitory dreams can disclose existential coordinates, forecast harm, and mediate relations with the dead, impacting people's lived trajectories and anticipation of 'existential descent.'

Abstract

ABSTRACT This narrative‐driven article explores the dream worlds of people in Bogotá’s downtown drug markets ( ollas ) and rehab centers ( patios ) following the Colombian state's 2016 militarized drug market raids. Drawing on twenty‐one months of fieldwork, it takes up dreams not as residues of a bounded psyche but as co‐constructed worlds where the dead and other forces act upon or orient the dreamer. Through free indirect discourse, this article aims to perform the sense of “thereness” and spatiality of the dream world that seems to impact people's lived trajectories and their anticipation of “existential descent,” or a vertiginous sense of befalling back into contexts of persistent violence and injury. Centered on Guillermo, a man in his forties whose premonitory dreams draw him back into conflict, the article shows how the oneiric can disclose existential coordinates, forecast harm, and mediate relations with the dead.

Comparable studies

Other qualitative studies on dreaming, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
The Other as a Nightmare: The Israeli-Arab Encounter as Reflected in Children's Dreams in Israel and the West Bank Jewish and Arab fifth to seventh graders living in various settings in Israel and the... 1989 Qualitative content analysis n = 212
Nonwaking Responses to Waking Stressors: Dreams and Nightmares1 Men from the cohort eligible for military duty during the Vietnam Conflict, varying in... 1990 Survey interview study n = 442
Communing with the Gods: The Dreaming Brain in Cross-cultural Perspective 2011 Phenomenological study
Partial memory reinstatement while (lucid) dreaming to change the dream environment. Lucid dreamers 2020 Qualitative study
Strange themes in pandemic dreams: Insomnia was associated with more negative, anxious and death‐related dreams during the COVID‐19 pandemic Global survey participants 2022 Longitudinal mixed-methods study n = 2,240

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