Caveat: Dreaming Anthropology

I had a very strange dream in the pre-dawn, this morning. I haven't been having memorable dreams, much, lately, but this one lingered for a long time after I woke up, and so I jotted a few lines about it.

I was living, like a field-linguist or field-anthropologist, among some very low-tech people in some kind of alternate universe where Korea was an isolated and utterly undevoloped country. I was with two old women sitting on the stoop of a pre-Western-contact thatch-roofed hut, and they were "teaching" me to eat manioc – that's what it was specifically called in the dream (in my mind, in the dream, if that makes sense – the women were speaking a Korean that I couldn't actually understand, and manioc is not a part of the Korean traditional diet, being from South America). Manioc is also called cassava, and yuca, and I remember eating it quite a bit when traveling in Central America, where it most definitely is part of the traditional diet. The women on the stoop of the house resembled Central Americans in other ways, too, perhaps.

It was a very slow-moving dream-time. The women chewed bits of manioc, and then would insist that I eat the pre-chewed bits of it. Then they taught me to chew a bit and pass it to them. This had some ritualistic purpose, but I kept trying to figure out how such a ritual could have developed. I wasn't really repulsed by it, but I was thinking "now I'm really integrated to their community – sharing spit like this." Yes, that was my thought, in the dream.

And I had this notepad where I was trying to write down in hangeul the various vocabulary items they used that I could understand. That's maybe more verisimilitudinous. One of the old women was clearly irritated with my note-taking. She kept gentlly pushing the pad away, and insisting that I chew more manioc. I wasn't really enjoying the taste of it, though. And they had these pickled radishes. These are more typical Korean cuisine. They tasted better, too. I reached for one with some chopsticks and the other woman got angry. She spit out the manioc on the ground told me to eat it. Pointing at it.

I woke up.

Dreams are weird.

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