The Forests

The history of dreams -those fictions recovered in the act of sleeping- is also the story of the restlessness they provoke in different cultures. As an involuntary mental process, the dream has been the object of different meanings and interpretations: representing communication between a superior being and its believers, or the result of inter-dimensional travels to parallel universes or perhaps premonitions of the future.

In Classical Greece Heraclitus considered that the dream had meaning only for each dreamer, while Plato conjectured a world of dreams that imprisoned humans in a cave. In the West of the industrial revolution, sleep was linked to productivity and biological rhythm; states such as drowsiness or exacerbated wakefulness were condemned. Then new ideas appeared: in science Freud, takes the side of the unconscious, an area of our psyche that orders thinking and feeling; Allan Hobson and Robert Mc Carley pronounce themselves for the brain as a generator of dream states, which they try to order through a physiological process. In turn, Hall and Van Castle conclude that there are no notable differences between the dreams of people belonging to different cultures.

What is certain is that we dream of those objects, feelings, persons or characters that frequent our daily experience. And we proceed to their oneiric metamorphosis. Thus, dreams have the aesthetic value of an experience that never ceases to amaze us. As Borges would say: the dream is a small play, the first form of drama with several characters.

And it is in the dramatic complexity of the oneiric metamorphoses, that we will try to discover 8 foreign and sacred territories, entering into 8 people who dream and who, in their wakefulness, constitute themselves as 8 diverse figures of their society of belonging. In the end, 8 characters who, together with the poet Walter von der Vegelweide, could ask themselves, “Have I dreamed my life or was it true?”

In a world of violent, vertiginous metamorphoses, in which reality fades into dreams and dreams become real, this technological ritual will offer viewers access to countless figures that reveal the unconscious of its protagonists. Figures that, mediated by the figure of the artist himself, will take on dramatic forms, making it possible for the dream to become independent from the intimate territory of the “dreamer” in order to investigate the enigmatic exercise of our own unconscious fictions.