Dream Plants and the Decolonial Imaginary: African Initiatory Technologies of Consciousness
Words by Nkhensani Mkhari
In the interstices between consciousness and revelation, between the material and the spiritual, lies a profound technology of knowing that Western epistemologies have long sought to delegitimize: the sacred relationship between African dream plants and initiatory consciousness. This relationship, far from being merely pharmacological, represents what we might term a "technology of transgressive becoming"—one that explicitly refuses the Cartesian mind-body dualism that has plagued Western thought.
Consider ubulawu, not merely as a collection of oneirogenic plants, but as what we might call an "apparatus of decolonial imagination." Within Southern African cosmologies, these plants function not simply as substances to be ingested, but as portals into what Sylvia Wynter might term "other modes of cognition." When a Nguni diviner develops what is called 'a soft head' and becomes 'a house of dreams,' we witness not just an alteration of consciousness, but a radical refusal of Western rationality's hegemonic grip on what constitutes knowledge production.
The significance of these dream plants extends beyond their biochemical properties. They represent what we might call a "technology of ancestral communion"—a means by which knowledge is transmitted not through the linear progressions of Western pedagogy, but through what Christina Sharpe terms "wake work." The dream state induced by these plants operates as what we might call a "fugitive space," where knowledge exists outside the surveilling gaze of colonial epistemologies.
This is particularly evident in the way these plants are used in initiatory ceremonies. The initiate's journey is not merely one of altered consciousness but represents what Fred Moten might call a "radical insurgency" against Western modes of knowing. The dream space becomes a site of what Katherine McKittrick terms "demonic grounds"—spaces where Black knowledge systems persist and flourish despite attempts at erasure.
The practice of using dream plants in African spiritual traditions thus emerges not just as a cultural practice, but as what we might term an "epistemological insurgency." When a Zulu diviner dreams of a medicinal plant (iyezi) and later finds it in the exact location revealed in the dream, we witness not just a practical application of dream knowledge, but a complete refutation of Western scientific rationalism's claim to epistemological supremacy.
This technology of consciousness refuses what Cedric Robinson terms the "terms of order" imposed by Western thought. Instead, it insists on what we might call a "pluriversal epistemology"—one where dreams, plants, and ancestral knowledge coexist not as quaint cultural artifacts but as legitimate and powerful modes of knowing and being.
In our contemporary moment, as artificial intelligence and predictive technologies attempt to colonize the future through algorithmic forecasting, these African dream plant technologies remind us that other ways of knowing—and dreaming—remain not just possible but necessary. They stand as what Tina Campt might call "a practice of refusal"—refusing both the relegation of indigenous knowledge to the realm of superstition and the reduction of consciousness to mere neurochemistry.
These plant technologies, these dream portals, these ancestral interfaces demand we recognize them not as relics of a "primitive" past but as sophisticated systems of knowledge production that continue to operate in the present. They represent what Katherine McKittrick might call "black methodologies"—ways of knowing that refuse the violence of Western epistemological frameworks while insisting on the validity of African ways of knowing and being.
In this time of algorithmic prediction and digital divination, perhaps we need more than ever to return to these technologies of dream and becoming. Not as a romantic retreat into the past, but as a radical engagement with ways of knowing that have always refused the limitations of Western rationality. For in these dream plants, these technologies of consciousness, we find not just alternative ways of knowing, but the seeds of what Édouard Glissant might call "a poetics of relation"—a way of being in the world that refuses the isolating individualism of Western thought while insisting on the possibility of other worlds, other ways of knowing, other futures.
