THROUGH LONGING AND FOG
PCCA Experiential Conference on Migration, December 5-7, 2025
My PC screen sinks into darkness, – in other places the sun gets up. The flight goes across Asia, the US, the Middle East, crosses over into the past and into images of the future. My feelings sink down into a drifting, a migratory mode. The conference itself develops into a dreamscape. All and everywhere is now, at the same time, in the same place. Borders seem to be wide open for any migration. Some notes from the logbook of my journey:
- “Where are you from?”- Stories as Receptacles of the World
Just past noon, I was sitting at my laptop in front of the latest setting of the Conference, the chosen “Event Group”, again new faces. In the background of the screens of the others I saw that the sun has not yet risen, or was it already after sunset over there?What is our chosen topic, the title of our group? This seems to be a relatively unimportant question. A very lively chatter set in immediately. “Where are you from?” What sounds like a polite and more formal sentence started out to fill the whole time frame of the group. Answers to this question grew into stories, stories dig down into previous generations, memories of long-gone family ancestors poured out. One story overlapped with that of another group member, and so it went. They flowed into each other, some voices pushed through – not to stop the recollections but rather to encourage more details to it. We came from different continents, but in stories of loss, of being forced to move, of being targeted as the Other, but also in our joy and resilience against all odds – in these stories it seemed we almost effortless transcended cultural backgrounds and generations. The stories were overwhelming, heartbreaking and cheerful at the same time. We wanted to cry and we wanted to laugh. A “Tummelplatz” of life.
But what about stories like mine, stories that give only poor visibility, where clouds conceal memories and do not want to release clear pictures, names, details? Now with hindsight I can see that untold stories are also an innate part of the network of life. I understand that in all life stories there are hidden portions, that want to be acknowledged also in their wordlessness. Nothing is lost.
Unwittingly, the group drew up a map of the world which can be read through the following legend:
– DISPLACEMENT: this is an inherent life experience of many, if not of the majority of people over generations. In deeper levels of biography we can find its traits in the lives of family ancestors – these are hidden treasure troves for connecting with ‘the Others’ in nowadays’ multipolar world
– THE STORIES: we are all the others of the others. Through them we might understand parts in ourselves that we did not see before. So it happened with me. A very colourful multigenerational experience of family life, on the surface not familiar to me, awoke something important inside me: my longing. To hear the stories in details let me understand that even those who I see as advantaged in life, as privileged, very often had to build their house on broken pillars: displacement, many kinds of misery and othering is engrained in the intergenerational biography of many. This insight enabled me to deal better with my envy towards them. Moreover it revived my empathy with those who are disadvantaged, who can’t live their life fully because of political and societal conditions. I realised that the chain of generations always has hidden parts, silent portions that nevertheless are important to sense and to tolerate when mapping out how to deal with Othering.
I ask myself after this rich event group: Can we really bring about change without knowing the stories of the Others, their deep reaching intergenerational stories, their stories of personal and collective life?
Our group was brimming with joy. It seems we were able to fuse dark clouds and rays of light. I think we sensed this. What we felt was the joy of: ‘We are alive’!
- Migrating Dreams
Always at the beginning of the Conference Day shutters were closed, darkness fell: “Turn off the camera – we are talking about dreams now”. Farewell daylight! The Conference turned into night mode. Everybody tried to dream – and even more difficult – to remember fragments of the night stories. In our daily sessions we already could witness some dreamlike scenes: a cat strutting elegantly through someone’s screen, and in the back, a dog raising his voice, barking. Now bigger animals were invited to show up. But the dreams took their time. Surprisingly in the beginning the reported dreams were, as one Conference member noticed, not extremely phantastic as one would have expected. Does it mean that the migrant situation is too realistic to allow for dreams? The dreamscape took time to take shape, but finally we could not resist the nightside of our life. Most prominently, a lioness showed up in a dream. The lion is considered being the king of the animals, our dream animal could therefore be the queen of the animals. She had, if not the lion’s share in the dream associations, but a prominent place in this. An animal to be feared, as it is said in the bible, Amos 3,8: “The lion has roared, who will not fear?” To be feared is surely also the female lioness, as experienced in the dream. The other side of the lion-heartedness was experienced in the dream associations too: to be assertive and to act aggressively is what life probably requires from a migrant when she wants to safeguard for her family, her own rights, her life.
The night diaries in the conference grew darker. Was the one who showed up in one dream dead or alive? The dividing line between day and night, death and life became more permeable. We heard about ruins, the forgotten dead, about unknown graves.
“Stop the music!” – a sharp command in one of the other dreams lead into another direction. Was this also a border command to draw back from the country of darkness and retreat to the clear order of the day?
We turned back to thoughts of more enlightened day time. The night dreams kept hanging in the air, but perhaps less connected to the distinctiveness of the day.
With hindsight I keep thinking about the role of dreams in our complex and demanding life when we want to bring about change. Yes, we need dreams that give us a vision, daydreams can have here a huge creative potential in tackling Otherness. But what about the darker dreams that creep out of the night, that are often very disconcerting and escape quick understanding? Can we give them a role in daily life? The Greek philosopher Synesios who lived in the 4th century in Ancient Libya developed a practice in this regard: He wrote regularly besides his day diary a night diary. According to him, both belong to each other, not the one without the other, not the day without the night. Synesios seems to have cultivated a regular migration of dreams into the day. He understood that also night dreams want to migrate. Yes, also ideas migrate, sometimes to us from the depth of history. We might welcome them and give them a home…
The flight across time zones and continents has concluded. I am back in my place, the clock confines itself again to one time zone only. What’s left? As the Nobel Prize-winning Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska says in one of her poems “Every beginning, after all, is nothing than a sequel and the book of events is always open in the middle” * The journey did not end here – neither the leaps into deep biographies of others and of myself, nor the efforts to draw my own Other from night dreams into daylight. Migration processes are long and arduous, probably what we only can grasp is a sequel.
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*Wislawa Szymborska, Love at first sight, in: Miracle Fair. Selected Poems of W.S., New York 2001, translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
Berlin, December 26th, 2025 Ingeborg Tiemann