Dream

I also continued my ongoing ”method” in involving friends’ stories in my work. It gives a democratic value as only parts of it is in fact my own experiences. Other peoples stories blends in with my own.

This time I asked friends to share the dreams they have at night, dreams connected with fear. At first, I simply asked them to share their fears: as a child, and as a grown up.

I am fascinated by the Dreamcatcher; and by a lot of spiritual practices that serves as ritual to keep us sane, to keep us safe. Because I believe in rituals (they don’t have to be in a religious or even in a spiritual sense) I asked my friends and family to share their fears, so that I could transcribe them into my own dreamcatcher. And by doing so I promised them that the fear would also lighten up, maybe even dissolve.

In this work I also addressed my fascination with sleeping and dreaming. I suffered from a sleeping disorder called sleep paralysis when I was younger, and my son suffers from a common thing for children to experience called night terrors. I think of how the patterns in dreams repeats themselves and how fears are often manifested in them. Our deepest fears.

Again, the theme can be seen as the personal versus what is universal.

Our fears, we learn to live with them. To live with fears is to be courageous, it is part of the human experience to have them. But some of them are more paralysing than we know. Especially being afraid of one another. How we will be perceived, being judged.

That we are not worthy of love and affection. But we are.

That we are separated. But we are not.

Things we do, how we act in negative and destructive ways are often sprung out of fears. When we put them into words, perhaps they can dissolve. Just like the bad dreams caught in the web of the dreamcatcher will dissolve by the mornings’ first rays of light.