A barrage of infectious dreams

Some people argue (party-poopers!) that sharing a dream is extremely dull and boring: I do believe it’s a fascinating and egalitarian act of socialization. It makes us glimpse the automatic, combinatorial poetry inside our brains while in standby mode. If poetry is the ideal literary form for dreamlike expression, animation is its plastic counterpart. A dream is movement and metamorphosis.

This was my thesis for Oneiropoiesis, a screenwriting workshop to adapt dreams into animated form, held at Escola Bloom in Barcelona —in my opinion, the best writing & literary school in the country. It was also the starting point for a barrage of surreal animated references (Émile Cohl, Satoshi Kon, Osamu Tezuka, Masaaki Yuasa, Tux and Fanny, Jack Stauber, Jan Švankmajer) and dream-like literary works (Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Can Xue, Henri Michaux, Pablo Katchadjian). A constellation of authors capable of infecting reality with dream, and the butterfly will dream us all. In the end of this maelstrom of a workshop, all participants shared their dream experiences, giving way to unexpected recurrences, connections, tropes. We wove a fishing net to catch and exchange adapted dreams, which will be discussed over the coming weeks.

We were asked to document the existence of this workshop with clear, illustrative photographs, but we were so deep in the collective unconscious that our promise fell into oblivion. Apologies! Perhaps the workshop had a foggy, almost unrepresentable nature. All I can offer is a distant snapshot worthy of Paparazzo, a couple screenshots of its digital dissemination, and an expressionist collective portrait that captures, I would say, the spirit of our workshop of dreamy animation.