I have been doing some research about Dream Incubation. I have always been fascinated by dreams; what they mean, what they do to us - when we are awake and when we sleep as well. In the last decade, I educated myself quite frantically, reading, learning, taking numerous classes in different contexts, different teachers or lines of thought.
Dreams are for me portals to ancestral repair. They are earth. They are soul. Many animist lineages speak of dreaming as a relational, participatory act and I am sad we have lost that too in our modern world.
I recently came across the «7-Night Arc Dream» by the GTDF1’s work collective. Vanessa Andreotti is a true inspiration for me. It seems that many aspects of her work and her collective have left a beautiful imprint in my unconscious self, so when I woke up this morning, I made this dream.
I am in a busy market place - I try to pass through a shop with long tubes of fabric - the vendor is not very nice with me. He makes comments. I cant pass by there … He is angry. He chases me. I don´t want to listen to him. I block my ears. Later on, in the same neighbourhood, I am trying to cross a very busy boulevard, as fast as I can when suddenly almost at the very end of it, I am not able to walk anymore. I cant feel my legs. My body is crippled. So I continue on the dirt ground crawling like a worm. It is dangerous but I make it on the other side. There, I meet with my mother and my sister. A gentle man approaches and hands over to me a white plastic bag containing different foods. He says I have forgotten it on the other side? He says that he added a bottle of Vichy water in the bag. I am grateful. I thank him. We walk in a the direction of a very busy street where I am supposed to have parked my car long time ago. But I don´t remember where exactly. The car might not be there anymore.
Sometimes I try to sit with the dream long enough and refrain from decoding. But this one, feels quite dense with ancestral codes. It does not speak in clear language though. Though I feel I have plundged myself in the deep waters of emotional landscapes and topography—textures of displacement, danger, gift, forgetfulness, and uncertain return. Its like a fragment of buried cloth: more than anything, we need to feel the weave with our hands.
My paternal grand-father Anastasios ( “the one who resurrects”) is very present to me these days. This summer (2025) I have launched a deeper research about him around the events that lead him to flee to France. I have written here quite a lot about him (for example in the article here beneath) and still did not find so much. This is a real excavation into the ancestral lands and psyche.
But this dream, incubated as I think it was, carried some very beautiful ancestral symbols. My grand father comes from Asia Minor - Anatolia. Greek from Turkey. From Manisa. He was fleeing the first massacres perpetuated by the Ottoman regime in 1916. This is why we all became French. This is how he became a tailor.
In my dream I am in a marketplace. This is not just a place of commerce—it’s where cultures, languages, desires, and dangers collide. In Ottoman and Greek memory: the tubes of fabric might echo lineages, identities, buried textures of the stories.
“The vendor is not very nice.” Is this ancestral memory of being dismissed, harassed, denied space—as women, as displaced people, as ones “out of place” in public space? Specially since I can clearly remember putting my hands over my ears to prevent me from hearing the nasty things he was shouting at me. Also, I can’t pass through. The gate is blocked. I am denied movement through a realm of textile, language, commerce. This may mirror my difficulty in accessing my ancestral line through patriarchal and historical closures. It is true that I am more and more bumping into nothingness when I am trying to find out resourceful information. I would like to know: who was left behind? what happened to the mother and father of my grand father? were they deported, killed ?
The boulevard in the dream feels modern—very wide, built for cars, and it is dangerous. As I near the end of the crossing, my body fails me—this is such a powerful symbol. Crawling is humbling, dangerous, a return to earth, animal, child, exile. But I don’t die. I cross. The cost is somatic. This echoes what many ancestors experienced in literal terms—fleeing, exiled, vulnerable, crawling between identities and empires. I feel this intensely.
Then, there is the dream’s gift. A stranger - is this an ancestor? A spirit? Maybe even a historical figure? Like a French man Felix Sartiaux2 I have read about that he was sent to Asia Minor by the French Government to conduct archaeological excavations at the ancient town of Eski Foça (Old Phocaea) and reported early on about the atrocities that had started before what is known as the Genocide of 1922. But I am digressing : The nice man from my dream returns something I forgot on the other side: a white plastic bag with different foods. And he adds in it: a bottle of Vichy water—an alkaline, mineral water, used for digestion, purification, healing. I am wondering if this is a reference to another story about my grand father. But it would be too long to go into this now.
Anyhow, I am being returned nourishment I forgot I needed—perhaps spiritual, ancestral, or the feminine sustenance I left behind while crossing into modern life. Or as I just said maybe just the French sign that I have to “integrate” somehow. The fact that he added Vichy water is striking—it implies a kind of curated care, like a spirit tending to my healing. I am grateful for him and grateful for the foods and the water, and also, I am not alone; my mother and sister are there. The feminine lineage—supporting my crossing and my recovery. I probably need to acknowledge that more because in fact, in my awakened times, I keep on forgetting.
Come to me not as ghosts, but as roots.
Sit with me not to explain, but to breathe.
I do not seek stories—I seek resonance.
I do not need facts—I offer listening.
https://decolonialfutures.net/
https://www.greek-genocide.net/index.php/quotes/testimonies/felix-sartiaux