ABSTRACT
Creating stability from the instability is no small task, yet all identity formation is engaged in this habitually bracing activity in which the issue is not so much staying the same, but maintaining sameness through alterity. Here dreams provide the royal road not so much to the unconscious but to where the spirit-action exists in paranoid dreamscapes of attraction and repulsion. Take the place of dreams in spirit-attack, bearing in mind that this is virtually the sole cause of serious misfortune, and such an attack always comes from outside the Cuna community. Baron Nordenskiold was impressed by what he saw as a certain Cuna paradox in absorbing the outside and changing world in order to stay the same. The strategy of mimesis and alterity involved in using a powerful First World State, notably the United States, against the exactions of the local Third World State, is an important and often tragic element of modern history.
