Beginning with the author’s subjective and imaginative dream experience, the article explores an unfolding itinerary through historical accounts, colonial literary texts, and postcolonial and sociological theory to examine the dream’s putative central object—a malnourished child living in Mali, West Africa. The layered contexts of the focal ethnography provide a reflective compass enabling writer and audience to examine subjective and objective significations that crowd, then expand to illuminate the experience. Oral and written narratives, as they absorb and elaborate human imagination, are envisioned as pivotal to the demarcation and disruption of categorical boundaries that shape and liberate sociological inquiry and social lives.
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