Other ways of thinking and dreaming

The oneiric experience in Reinhart Koselleck, Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa

Abstract

Starting from an epistemic practice that seeks to ensure difference, this work consists of a necessary dialogue between Theory of History and some of its related fields, such as Philosophy, and Anthropology, embracing a research on the thoughts of Reinhart Koselleck, Ailton Krenak and David Kopenawa about the oneiric experience. The intention here is to point out how the way those thinkers adopted an approach about dreams provides us with an alternative perspective to the ways of life and thought in the Western World. Therefore, the approach we are referring to has a powerful effect on our relationship with contemporary challenges on knowledge and sociopolitical issues. We begin with an overview on what would be the oneiric activity in the Western World. Then we try to demonstrate the thoughts of Koselleck and indigenous wisdom, which can be taken as opposed to this Western trajectory. In the conclusion, we explain our epistemological, ethical and political choices for those thinkers and subject, as we approach an overview of what, according to Koselleck, is the “history of the defeated” (or the history of those who have been silenced). We do this theoretical exercise in conjunction with an urgent reflection towards reevaluating colonial conceptions.