ABSTRACT
This essay plays along with Tim Ingold’s Dreaming of Dragons. First, it questions the paradoxical translation and purification processes that resulted in non-Western knowledge traditions cast as beliefs and classed together with religion in contraposition to science. The paper will argue that the challenges faced by contemporary science arise from the onto-epistemological baggage inherited from Christianism. It continues exploring some of the equivocations in those translations: how some of the phenomena that substantiate Amerindian ontologies were discarded as malicious fantasies or, at best, aural hallucinations, first by Western religion and later by its science. It will examine cochlear anatomy and physiology along with other aspects of the auditory system that question such interpretation and suggest a channel tuned to a microbial reality eliciting those perceptions, reminding us that there may be more reality to dreams and imagination than the West has been willing to acknowledge; microbial worlds are not beyond the reach of our senses. Our existence may depend on remembering how to negotiate and develop diplomacy with more-than-human worlds.
