Oaxaca

This book opens with the following warning: “There are many ways of touring a city: Mazatlán by plane, Paris by swimming, Valencia by horse, Helsinki by browsing an old photo album, Kapaa through the story of an intrepid one-armed surfer. In any case, those who absorb a city and give testimony of it, are prepared to keep their eyes wide open. But not in this book! The observations that are collected here and which we wish to share with you were obtained through hundreds of well-shut eyes. We invite you to discover extraordinary events through the dreams of children. In this book, you will be able to observe the supernatural universe that surrounds Oaxaca when the sky goes dark and part of the world is asleep”.

During November 2014, Roger Omar visited schools and libraries in Oaxaca and its surroundings, with the purpose of collecting the dreams of Oaxacan children. The most palpable results of that experience (which the author narrates in detail in the final pages of this book) are thousands of children’s dreams, and of those gathered, only a few significant samples are presented in this book.

These 99 dreams, with their corresponding illustrations, are reproduced as faithfully as possible, and, with the exception of some very extensive texts or some drawings which had to be adapted to the format, all collaborations retain the original characteristics of the paper and the writing. The orthographic and syntactic peculiarities from the authors have been maintained, as well as each of their spelling mistakes. We recommend readers to look at them with indulgence because, most likely, a good portion of these young people were not fully awake when they put down on paper what they were dreaming about only a second ago.