Paper short abstract:

This proposal challenges Western dualities of Nature and Culture by focusing on the understanding and practice of dreaming in an indigenous family at Lake Icalma in southern Chile. It reveals how dreams are part of a system of communication between humans and other-than-humans.

Paper long abstract:

The research takes the form of a film, in between ethnographic research and experimental multimodal practice, bringing together content and form. The research inhabits the agential continuities and communication between beings in the territory: through specific knowledge of dreams interpretation, Belisario, the protagonist, accesses a system of communication between his spirit and the spirits that co-inhabit the territory: the spirit of the lake, of the deceased, among others. While sleeping, his spirit can travel around meeting the other spirits, whilst his body stays in bed. In a world where every material entity has a spiritual 'double', dreaming serves as a technology of communication and relation, of reciprocity and cohabitation, that challenges the anthropocentric Western way of being in the world and the prevalent nature/culture divides.