SLEEPING BEAUTIES - CHASING GHOSTS

It’s no secret that we roughly spend one third of our lifetime asleep. Despite the total personal relationship that each of us has with sleep, the information that we have, concerning the time we pass subconscious, is very little. It is widely believed that during sleep all creatures seem to rest and regain power. We also know that most of the organs switch to a hibernated mode, but what seems to be the great unknown is the intense brain activity for periods of time during sleep. These are easy to be recognized or even timed by an observer, since rapid eye movement (REM) is its signature symptom. REM periods correspond to what the sleeping person describes as dreaming.

But what is a dream exactly? How does it relate to experience and do dreams have any function? Is it a mechanism or the result of brain operations? The unconscious seems to be of equal, if not of greater importance with the time we are awake. During sleep, apart from organizing thoughts and rationalizing reality in our own terms, some unexpected projections of images seem to redirect our attention to different areas.

Sometimes the effect is so intense that a strange sleep seems to haunt us during the next morning or day. Sigmund Freud described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious”. Is the subconscious the storage room at the back of our heads or is it the leading office that in fact decides what makes us happy? Is it any of the above? Or is it both and even more? The most honest way to deal with this great unknown subconscious ocean of thoughts, is to mark our conscious position and try to map the fog around. It seems that a dream is the place where conscious and subconscious interact. Precious time and its’ deterministic arrows have absolutely no value during dreams, while new laws shape the fabric of these experiences. These, sometimes, emotionally intense moments are very important in shaping the ways we perceive, conceive and ultimately act on the world. After all, humans seem to swing between chasing or being haunted by a dream.

SLEEPING BEAUTIES – CHASING GHOSTS is an effort to overcome the wall of cognition and acquire experience using the method of irrationality. With intention to reveal and fail better. What did Sleeping Beauty dream during her years of sleep? This seemingly naïve question is the epicenter of our work for our new dance performance. The much greater difficulty for a child to separate between fantasy and reality and the obsession of adults to rationalize and underestimate dreams is what gives us the reason.