Common Nightmare - Can a Random Collection of Dreams Be Considered Visual Anthropology?

Creating a document of the coronavirus pandemic has proved to be more difficult than I initially thought. It seemed like an evident choice, since most places were closed, people were not gathering together, events were cancelled - people were not living exclusively among the four walls as in the first, spring wave of the pandemic but were not socially active either. It became hard to seek subjects and communities outside of one's immediate environment. However, the world was suddenly filled with visually compelling, unprecedented sights: empty streets, restaurants and bars, deserted public locations, vacant public transportation, masked people everywhere and an unusual mass of food delivery people. It seemed like a very understated, banal apocalypse. But these images were repeated ad nauseam by the media, we almost became desensitized - it was shocking during the first wave but it turned into our lived, shared reality.

My first idea when I started thinking about making a short visual sequence was capturing people's weird pandemic dreams. It was a well-documented, eerie phenomenon: most people developed sleeping issues, started waking up in the middle of the night and started having more vivid, odd dreams. The majority of them carried some sort of symbolism or hidden anxiety in connection with the infection or evoked nostalgia for our previous, corona-free life. I had a number of such dreams (about friends I have not seen in a while, being stuck in a crowd of unmasked people, dreams of violence and threat) and I often discussed dreams with friends who had the same experience. My initial plan was just to record some of them recounting their dreams via Zoom - a platform whose grainy, strictly functional visual aesthetic unwittingly shaped our last few months. Then, I was convinced by my teachers and peers that listening to a series of talking heads would not be so engaging. I changed the premise, I decided to create something more associative and experimental: I planned to pair the pre-recorded dream accounts with mundane, typical scenes of the pandemic. Images of masked people, deserted streets, the army of food delivery people, long walks in nature far from the others. The scenes we all kept seeing ad nauseam. Later, I realized that I was subconsciously inspired by a short film I was earlier, Dana Levy's The Last Man (2020). She paired footage from live streaming webcams and CCTVs from the 2020 spring lockdown with the soundtrack from the 1960s sci-fi movie called The Last Man on Earth. The eerie effect was produced by the unreal that crept inside our everyday lives: the images of empty cities, beaches, restaurants, zoos, airports, schools were just as unbelievable as Vincent Price trying to fight the vampire plague alone. It was high concept, low budget. Filming possibilities were restricted, so Levy utilized found footage (document and fiction) and created new meaning by combining them.

Since my own technical skills and possibilities were restricted as well, I decided to do something similar. I did not have a professional camera (and I could not handle one anyway) and I was stuck first in Budapest, then in Debrecen. There was no full lockdown but stimuli were scarce. I felt that the images I chose were banal and cliché, they became the standard visual aesthetic of our time. I had doubts that using the dream accounts as soundtrack would make them come to life. I started collecting dreams from my classmates earlier: I asked seven of them to record their dream accounts in their own languages and send the sound file to me. People usually dream in their native languages, many of them were stuck far away from home (I intended to capture these aspects) and the different cadences of languages provided different moods and tempos for the final film. The seven accounts ended up being too much: using all of them would have stretched the narrative too long and some of them were so elaborate that I could not possibly create a proper visual sequence for them. So, I abandoned three of them them (the longer and more difficult ones) and I kept the four shorter ones. One in English, one in Russian, one in German and one in Portuguese. I needed to identify connections between them and create an order. One was a classic anxiety nightmare about a dark, threatening figure in a medical mask - it needed to be in the beginning, symbolizing the crippling fear of the initial lockdown when the virus was new. I could only imagine it as a typical horror scenario - this part became the most "fictional" of the short film. The other three dreams embodied some sort of small "resistance" against the pandemic. One of my friends - a passionate cook who enjoys feeding people and having merry feasts - dreamt about a dining with friends. It was nostalgia for small, ordinary pleasures that were not available during the pandemic. But the harsh reality of COVID was solitary order-ins facilitated by exhausted, exploited delivery people, so I wanted to pair the account with images of messengers with huge, angular boxes on their backs. Another dream was about losing a friend during a walk in a vast garden and then finding oneself among a crowd of strangers: I wanted to combine this account with images of a serene stroll in the woods and then an abrupt presence of people. I wanted to capture how contradictory the closeness of people has become: we long for their company but we are so afraid of the infection that we panic when others get too close. The last sequence was inspired by a common trauma that affected my own class, department and university - the unjust incarceration of my friend and classmate. It hit us in the middle of the pandemic which made mobilization and advocacy difficult. My peers needed to protest, strategize and raise awareness of him while being dispersed all over the world and being banned from public, physical assembly. It was literal resistance, literal struggle amidst the pandemic. The last dream involved a symbolic sublimation of this struggle in the form of climbing an intimidating rock wall. I wanted to pair this dream with the images of the actual protest for our classmate - a weirdly careful grouping that tried to follow the COVID-regulations with masked people who were standing far from each other. This last dream was an ideal epilogue for the film because it was the most powerful example of resistance - it demonstrated pain but also a glimmer of hope. One of my classmates in the Visual Anthropology course, Tiphaine Trudelle provided me with excellent quality footage of the protest, I would like to thank her again. She also documented the struggle of my peers in a deeper and worthier way than I did which I am also thankful for.

At times I was also doubtful that I was engaging with anthropology at all. Can an arbitrary assortment of dreams tell us anything new about our life and social practices during the pandemic? Does it create new knowledge? If it does, does it imply that we are alike in our angst and longing or we all have our individual, specific fears and desires? I could not decide whether this topic only fascinates me or it could be revelatory for others as well. The visual sequences seemed too associative and the dream accounts sounded too poetic. From an artistic point of view it did not seem visually pleasing enough. I guess I have internalized the view of anthropologists that condemns anything appears too "artsy" and considers it "non-science". I love watching films and I love analyzing and dissecting them, but I had a hard time putting this theoretical knowledge into practice. My cuts were abrupt and sudden, the sequences lacked a smooth tempo that would fit the mood and cadence of the respective dreams. An additional challenge was that each dreamer had their own idiosyncratic tone and diction and I had to adjust my visuals to these differences (fortunately for me, each of them speak beautifully). It needed several re-editing and adjustments until I could time the visuals with the soundtracks, at least approximately. These repeated re-edits taught me that the change of timing in cuts and the change of associations in images created different effects that could only be learned by experimenting. The end result is still raw, jumpy and imperfect but at least I felt that I had a concept and an aim with the dream sequences and I tried my best to convey it. It ended up being a clumsy, weird memorial of the troubled pandemic dreams that almost everybody is experiencing nowadays. There is vague longing, nostalgia and anxiety. It is also important to note that the film captures my own longing - all dreamers are my friends who I am separated from.