Bogotá Dreaming

Premonitions, Nightmares, and Violence's Impossibility

Bibliographic Data

ID23311535
AuthorsAndrés Romero (0009-0001-7159-4104, Rollins College, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume31
Issue3
Publication date2026-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1935-4932 • E-ISSN: 1935-4940
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jlca.70055
OpenAlexW7170939587
LanguageEN
References cited28

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.

Anticipation (artificial intelligence) · Dream · Existentialism · Impossibility · Possible world · Psyche · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Latin American Literature Studies