Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a way of approaching the memory of the war and the ongoing reconciliation process in the post-conflict Peru, from the “point of view” of the dreams of the inhabitants of the region of Ayacucho and the accounts of dreams collected from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Paper long abstract:

The armed conflict between the Shining Path movement and the Peruvian army in the 1980s and 1990s deeply shaped the life of the Andean people in the region of Ayacucho, the epicenter of the violence. This paper offers a way of approaching the memory of this war and the ongoing reconciliation process from the "point of view" of the dreams of the inhabitants of two peasant communities in the region of Ayacucho and the accounts of dreams collected from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While investigating the oneiric revelations, dreams that "act" upon bodies, the visits of the souls of the desaparecidos, it is possible to penetrate the complex dialectics between memory and forgetting that shapes post-war settings and that takes on specific patterns in the oneiric dimension. This paper discusses on the one hand how the imaginary and the oneiric "iconographies" and interpretations historically transform themselves, embodying historical events and interacting with them, and on the other hand explores how oneiric narrations play an important part in the construction of personal biographies, memories of certain episodes (such as war), and in the process of coping with the experience of violence shaping this social context.