Dreaming of Africa, continued

I’m going to participate in a conference, in order to stop the privatization of Africa. Different African delegates will be at the conference, where Western businessmen will divide and sell different parts of Africa to themselves. It’s highly absurd and unmoral, and I’m supposedly participating as a unified representative of Africa with the goal of stopping the act of selling. I’m a bit unsure who gave me the mission, I’ve never met the Africans and all that I can put forward are moral counterarguments. I’m especially uncertain about my legitimacy since I’m a completely external participant. I’m running around in the big conference centre, the actual meeting is in western Africa, but I’m in the eastern part and it has to take a lot of time to travel over an entire continent, but soon the conference begins! I finally arrive at a meeting that has gathered a large amount of Africans, but they seem to be mistaken, the meeting is all about coffee and different samples is given away. I continue to run towards the western part.

On the sea of sound and vision, direction down

This dream displays the Cormorant Council in action, doing some mobilis in mobili dream-geographical thinking/discovery.

Noted dream geographer MF invites a group of people for a tour around the Stockholm archipelago on his yacht. This is all nice, but everybody agrees that we need a specific destination. A woman of the group then invites us all to spend the weekend in her parents´ home in Skåne, should we go there. In order to avoid an embarrassed silence following this more insolent than ridiculous suggestion, I try to joke about it by absurdly agreeing with her. "It´s in the north of Skåne, so it´s really only a few kilometres away from Stockholm." Noone gets the joke, so I begin considering if this absurd geographical assumption is actually true. Instead we enthusiastically decide to go to the Canary Islands.

The navigational chart on board the boat shows the vague outlines of a great sea monster that can be further discerned by connecting some dots on the chart with a blue ink pencil. This is actually how you navigate on this ship. There is no steering-wheel or rudder, just this chart and a pencil to set us going. As I start connecting the dots the sea monster soon appears around us, surprisingly in the form of intensifying sound. As the sound gradually takes the shape of a song or a melody we realize we have arrived at the Canary Islands. Again surprisingly, the Canary Islands are situated beneath us instead of somewhere on the horizontal plane - and to get there we have to climb down a lead line.

The dream to me signals two themes and their possible interrelation.

First, "sound-geography", which could account for synaesthetically percieved journeys or landforms, possibly derived from music or other sonorous structures.

Second, "vertical geography", which could retell hell-visits, rabbit-hole plunging, abyssal exploration and the like.

NN