Wading Through Dreams

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Naive Yearly’s second edition was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2024, and now we’re now publishing versions of the conference talks, edited and condensed into essays. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.

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Over a decade ago, a nightmare became the unexpected catalyst for my move from Toronto to Berlin. Since then, I’ve been writing down my dreams regularly. In my journals, scrawls dictated by the subconscious are nestled between waking entries, often delineated with a squiggle that resembles a tilde. Dream records are raw and unrestrained, governed by the peculiar logics and temporalities of the dreaming mind. Some mornings, my half-asleep hand hastily dashes a couple of lines, rendering flickering worlds and sensations into a flimsy assemblage of words. On other mornings, slanted and spidery cursive, varying in legibility and tone, run and run across pages scattered with wonky stick drawings and uneven spacing. 

When the body succumbs to sleep, when stillness settles into night, dreams stir and awaken. Past, present, and future converge, rippling into one another in infinite relations. Familiar feelings transmute into unfamiliar forms. Intuitions speak with incredible clarity. Though technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and EEG, can map brain activity during various stages of sleep, there is still no way of directly observing dreams as they happen. Dream journaling, then, becomes the practice of documenting the traces and impressions that continue to linger.

Revisiting my dream journal entries is an experience both jarring and illuminating. It’s writing that only streams through me while I’m barely awake, so I’m often surprised by what I read in the light of day. Landscapes take on lives of their own. Scribbles remain stubbornly ambiguous. Seeds of ideas eventually grow into waking actions. Scenes gesture towards future events. For years, I occasionally glanced back at these accounts. I wanted to look at them in-depth, but the prospect of sifting through the stacks of notebooks I’d kept since 2012, locating dream entries, and transcribing them digitally felt daunting. Last year, during my residency at Est-Nord-Est in Québec, I was grateful to have time to examine nearly five years’ worth of dream journal entries. I noticed that the more I stayed with these accounts, even when they appeared indecipherable, the more they began to reveal themselves. 

Dreamwriting sways between flashes of feeling and vivid episodes, often without context — mirroring the way a dreamer shares a half-remembered vision. Despite disjointedness and deviations from well-worn narrative conventions, the retelling of the dream is charged with intimacy and otherness at once. Truths are scattered across the dream’s constellation of images, symbols, and stories, resisting coherence and single interpretations. Amidst the ungraspable, there’s a fragrance of the intricate feelings that lie beneath. 

Reflecting on dreams together

Nearly everyone dreams nightly, yet modern life offers little room for collective dream reflection. In 2019, I launched ONEIRIC SPACE with writer and movement teacher Effie Efthmyiadi as a research and publishing project delving into the interplay between dreams and waking life. After years of publishing conversations with artists and researchers through a website and newsletter, I felt drawn toward assembling gatherings where attendees could slow down and attend to dream memories together.

In 2023, during a residency at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, located near the German-Dutch border, I began envisioning a format where anyone interested in dreams could enter into dialogue with ONEIRIC SPACE’s research. At the same time, I became increasingly aware of a disconnect between my writing mind and my body. As I integrated movement practices into my daily life and attuned to my bodily rhythms, I felt a deeper sense of connectedness — with myself, others, and my surroundings. This led me to explore embodied approaches to writing and public readings. How can I write with and for the body in space? What energies are exchanged when words circulate from body to body (rather than from screen to body or print to body)? And how do the visual, auditory, olfactory, and spatial elements in an environment shape encounters with language and memory? 

While spiraling around these questions, I experimented with “participatory readings,” an evolving format that includes grounding exercises, short readings based on ONEIRIC SPACE’s research, and guided activities. The intention is to create a calm, restorative space for attendees to contemplate dream memories while engaging the body and senses. I encourage participants to listen to their bodies throughout the session — whether that means sitting, lying down, stretching, moving around, drinking water, or taking a nap — finding whatever they need to feel comfortable while respecting others around them. For me, the texts aren’t the focal point — they’re a bridge, a way in. They aim to support participants in a deeper reflection on how dreams are entangled with our waking lives, both individually and collectively. 

In The Extended Mind, science journalist and author Annie Murphy Paul argues that thinking isn’t isolated in the brain but also involves the body, movement, environments, and social interactions. In a chapter examining the effect of natural surroundings on mental processes, I was struck by the idea of “soft fascination,” a gentle, effortless form of attention that allows the mind to rest and recover. It often arises in nature, and I realized I’ve experienced it countless times while gazing at rippling water or watching trees sway with the wind, but didn’t know there was a name for it. Unlike the focused attention required for a difficult task, soft fascination allows the mind to wander, opening it to memories, thoughts, emotions, and unexpected connections. An ideal state of mind for conjuring dream memories, imho.

For Wading Thru Dreams, 2gether, held at ACUD Galerie as part of the exhibition There has to be smth in the room, I guided participants to consider dreams as both personal experiences and collective phenomena that can reveal larger patterns. To evoke soft fascination indoors, I pieced together a video projection in an attempt to create a “window” in the room, collaborated with artist and producer Soda Plains on gently evocative soundscapes, and incorporated textiles to soften the space. While I’ve previously used Ryoko’s Forest Bathing scent for the readings, I’m now working with Oana Tudoran of Accidental Perfumes to develop a custom fragrance.

For the final prompt, I invited participants to anonymously contribute to a collaborative digital exercise with the understanding that their responses could be integrated into future readings and publications. Scanning a QR code on a handout, attendees accessed a writing canvas, where they could share thoughts, questions, or insights. This offered glimpses into other perspectives on dreams, as well as the potential for the group to recognize shared resonances without speaking. When I returned to these responses at Est-Nord-Est, I was deeply moved by their honesty and vulnerability. I began thinking about ways to share them with others through future readings. 

The breath of water and wind 

Dreams often unfold in fragmented, nonlinear, and multilayered ways, similar to flitting between windows, tabs, and apps. Like dream flashbacks, scrolling through content can feel urgent, personal, and intense. I’m often alarmed by how quickly my heart races while facing a screen, a sensation not unlike waking up from an anxiety dream. It wasn’t until I spoke with Kristoffer about my contribution to Naive Yearly that I began to notice the parallels between dreams and the internet. 

Our conversation happened halfway through my time at Est-Nord-Est, where I was immersed in dream journal entries featuring nonhuman beings and surrounded by striking landscapes of the St. Lawrence River. I had been researching a new participatory reading that pondered how dream life responds to the climate crisis and might disperse with artificial boundaries between humans and nature. When Kristoffer mentioned that he had planned for my session with Reuben Son to be screenless and outdoors, it felt serendipitous.

For Naive Yearly, I expanded on the research I began at Est-Nord-Est and presented a work-in-progress participatory reading called the breath of water and wind, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The impetus for the gathering came from multiple starting points mentioned in the reading itself, one of which was a dream I had after following news about the 2022 Pakistan floods. In it, I experienced the landscape itself — a volatile body of water — as the protagonist, a first for me. This dream lingered in my mind while I spoke to writer and artist Manisha Anjali for ONEIRIC SPACE. She told me how rising sea levels, the displacement of climate refugees, and the existential threat of her homeland, the Fiji Islands, disappearing weighed heavily on her dreams and waking thoughts. Later, I came across an article delving into how climate change influences dream life. These personal, collective, and ecological threads gradually began to entwine themselves with my thinking about the fragmented, associative nature of navigating both dreamscapes and the digital realm. 

As I developed the participatory reading — writing, designing reflective exercises, and imagining how words might land on participant bodies at the site of the reading along the Ljubljanica River — I tried to flow with dream journal excerpts and anonymous participant responses, allowing them to unfold on their own accord. How could I engage with these recorded dream fragments without imposing waking-world frameworks onto them? How might this material want to relate and respond to the nonhuman beings in Ljubljana? Rather than clinging to preconceived notions about what the texts should be, I tried to remain open, keeping my body supple and my mind receptive to whatever arose. Though I was guided by certain intentions — like considering the nonhuman beings in dreams, and sparking curiosity about how nightly dreams seep into our waking realities — the key was to stay attuned to my felt sense during the process.

While I remotely researched the nonhuman beings surrounding the Museum of Architecture and Design Ljubljana, where the talk would be held, coincidences and unexpected connections began to emerge. For instance, reflecting on Zhuangzi's butterfly dream — an ancient Chinese parable that questions the boundaries between reality and illusion — led me to discover that the butterfly populations in Slovenia are among the most diverse in the region. (According to the European Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, there are 181 species there!) This, in turn, brought me back to a conversation with artist Daniel Godínez Nivón about the disappearing Oyamel trees in southwestern Mexico, which serve as a winter sanctuary for monarch butterflies. In these moments, I felt a sense of awe and expansiveness within my body. 

By weaving personal and gathered dream fragments with anecdotes and conversations from ONEIRIC SPACE, I attempted a form of layered, multivocal storytelling that hovers between temporalities and states of consciousness. I read each text aloud, then led a guided reflection meant to open up space for participants to pause, allow dream memories to surface, and observe any personal links or associations to the material. I like to think of the breath of water and wind as a meditation on the ancient, ungraspable worlds we’re in touch with every night and day — dreams, the body, nature. How might attuning to their ineffable languages stretch our waking visions of the past, present and future?