Dreams and war: An ethnography of the night in the Peruvian Andes

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 article offers a way of approaching the memory of the war and the ongoing reconciliation process from the "point of view" of the dreams of the inhabitants of two peasant communities in this region, and the accounts of dreams collected from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While investigating the oneiric revelations, the dreams that "act" upon bodies, and the visits of the souls of the desaparecidos, it is possible to penetrate the complex dialectics between memory and forgetting that shape postwar settings and that take on specific patterns in the oneiric dimension. © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association.