Commentary on Dreaming: History and Untended Grief
Christopher Krupa
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology October 8, 2026 DOI: 10.1111/jlca.70073 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Key points | Argues that the dreams of Guillermo and Rodolfo in Bogotá's underworlds counter the triumphalist narrative of Colombia's 2016 peace agreement, revealing time as an 'infinite loop' rather than progress toward peace or detox. The essay further contends that militarized raids on ollas and carceral 'houses of passage' continued counter-insurgency logics under the rebranding of crime control, and it questions whether ethnographic interpretation risks domesticating the dreams' force. |
Abstract
Bogotá Dreaming immerses readers in the feral dreamworlds of the discarded foot soldiers of Colombia's armed conflict and narco-economy as they try to survive through cycles of addiction and institutionalized recovery in Bogotá’s underworlds. The article is set in 2016–2017 but, like the dreams themselves, time in Romero's article is an elusive anchor, always present but not always in ways we might expect. Right there in Bogotá, on November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC-EP signed a peace agreement claiming to end over five decades of war. While the sloganeering surrounding the agreement was ostentatious and loud, triumphantly marking late 2016 as a time of epochal rupture, national transformation, and the inauguration of “total peace,” neither the fanfare nor the peace accords find mention here. Instead, a different experience of time comes to the fore, with the oneiric offering a muted response to national hubris. In the dream worlds of Guillermo and Rodolfo, the present is a vulnerable condition, saturated with sensorial immediacy, but also where past and future collapse in on themselves, where haunting, revelation, and premonition undermine any progressivist teleologies of forward momentum (to peace, to detox) through the pull, the itch of constant return, “shackled,” as Rodolfo puts it, to “this infinite loop of time”. All withdrawal—from war, from bazuco, from life on the streets, from the past—seems fleeting. The Bogotá we meet in Romero's writing offers glimmers of a counter-narrative of transition's impossibility, one in which violence is everywhere but morphing in ways that might provide its own revelation of larger transformations afoot. The raids on the ollas that sent Guillermo and others into rehab or to prison were part of an expansive security project targeting spaces absorbing the transient fallout of war and the drug economy. Incessant throughout the 2010s, these militarized incursions showed a continuation of counter-insurgency logics right when the need for them was supposed to be ending. Rebranded as crime control and anti-gang policing, urban securitization programs developed a wide assortment of experimental modes of incarceration and enemy warehousing, like the patios or detox centers that Romero reminds us are infused with a carceral ambience that is lost on no one. “Houses of passage,” they're called, but to where, exactly?—the project of mass incarceration has already expanded well beyond the prison, overtaking anything approximating the social. Still, Guillermo must leave to search out a violence promising not escape but life. What and when is this violence he is pulled toward? The dreams. I want to follow Romero's efforts to engage with the worlds dreams make and the work they do without wrestling them into diagnostic, interpretive, or therapeutic frames, but I feel the pull of ethnographic habits wanting to tame them, render them symptomatic of their historical context, and see them as offering some corrective rebuttal to the disingenuous pax colombiana that can't but be laced with heavy doses of trauma, detox, and grief. If not gateways to interiority, then maps of a collective extimacy, the caminante as apocalyptic visionary moving between different states of consciousness, surveying the ruins at once buried and on the surface and telling us the dead, the demons, the horrors are everywhere—just look closely at the ash, you'll see. Is this what Romero wants us to see in these heavily curated dreamscapes? Or does this undermine their potency, rope them back in line with historical time, further strip authorship from the dreamers and their spectral forces? If a tolerable reading, I would request license for widening the frame somewhat. Bogotá’s patios and ollas, its streets and prisons are already spaces of fabulation and, with that, as with the dreams of their inhabitants, are co-produced not just by apparitions and the angry dead, but also in concert with the Quitos and Managuas and San Salvadors and Washingtons and Tel Avivs that circulate weapons and drugs and people across the hemisphere, generating their own dreams of total containment or elimination that Romero's brilliant work here has brought us deep into in entirely unprecedented ways.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Metaphor and hyperassociativity: the imagination mechanisms behind emotion assimilation in sleep and dreaming | 2015 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up | 2009 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |