WE SHOUND ALL BE DREAMING | Oyounity Report by Dumama
4 volunteers & 30 people invited to the think tank dinner party titled: We should All be Dreaming
A long table, sonic textures and a nostalgic command suggesting that we SHOULD all be dreaming. Why are we not? How do we dream actively? The workshop was encouraging us to exercise agency over our dream states. Engaging with Dreams as collaborators.
I can be dreaming more in my work, do I? And what holds me back. As a professional dreamer in a world demanding coherence of the multi-dimensional experience of those of us who have the privilege of dreaming (ie. Black code switching femmes in a post-intergenerational trauma reveal anti-colonial femnist making simulation travellers), this workshop initiated by Sonya Lindfors and Maryan Abdulkarim has transformed and expanded the limits of my perception around reality, collaboration and freedom. Their transmitted invocation, “words make worlds” accompanies me through my days, since our initial encounter.
Below, I will present fragments of thoughts, poetry and questions presented to me during the processes of participating and observing as a reporter in the process.
It’s so important to dance. Imagine dreaming with your entire body? “The possible has been tried and failed”. Sun Ra
“Our imagination is restricted by what was passed onto us. What can we be at our best? Who can we be?”
“Dreaming as an attempt to imagine the possible”
Working economies??? What’s our relationship with consumption?? Aging Utopias?
“These bones will one day rise and raise a thunderous war to reclaim her heritage”.
“And I was by this creating for myself a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enrich me within its crude mythology. That I could be a star, a stone, a flame, a river or a cupful of air was purely because they all seemed to have a significance irrevocably not
my own. Therefore I ignored them and recreated them with words, cadences, lights, murmuring and storms of air escaping the blast that came from out there”.
– Dambudzo Marechera writing the collective soul
We don’t know who danced our dream into reality, and now we’ve made our homes in the unknown. Remembering the unknowns and then power to dream with open eyes.
What are you dreaming of?
You’re never as alone as you feel?
Tell me what’s really real?
When/ where did you last remember being free or at ease?
What brings you hope What brings your joy?
Are we really listening? Or trapped in decoy
What noise do the stars make Body noise
Body knows
The secrets of the lake
Seasons keep changing
Whose re-arranging the furniture Of your interior
Why so serious
Are you really here?
Is this your dream or mine?
It’s changing with time
You’re gonna be fine, we promise
The oceans they clear And the rivers they clear Still I wish you were here
Do we only dream when we feel discontent? Whose meant to hear here right?
Who writes the future? Who writes the past? Asking the questions we never ask, at last
The last oceans they clear The lakes they clear
Still I wish you were here
