UCL students bring dreams to life through animated videos

The team created the project, ‘Lockdown Dreams’, to explore and study what effects the pandemic was having on the way that we dream. From April 2020 through to March 2021, they collected dreams from over 500 volunteers and analysed common trends and correlation. They found that it was common for the dreams to be unusually vivid, with themes such as frustration, fear and anxiety prevalent.

The team created three short videos to illustrate their findings and hypothesise the reasons for the heightened impact of dreams.

In one video, the narrator discusses parallels between Lockdown Dreams and the 1966 book ‘The Third Reich of Dreams’ by Charlotte Beradt, in which she collected the dreams of people living through the Third Reich. Beradt suggests that when “reality verges on nightmare, dreams provide a seismographic record of the impact on the psyche.”

They go on to explain that while dreams allow us to process emotional experiences, it is possible that an experience, such as living through a pandemic, can prove too much for our dreaming ability. This can result in hyper-vivid dreams that leave a person with feeling of anxiety and fear upon waking.

Dr Liz Allison, Director of the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit and co-writer, director and producer of the videos, said:

“The Lockdown Dreams project is an innovative and thought-provoking piece of research which has allowed us to try and make sense of the ways many of us have felt or continue to feel throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a time of great uncertainty and fear, and our unconscious mind is not immune from these troubling feelings. The opportunity to hear about hundreds of people’s dreams from across the world, and bring them to life through animation, has been both rewarding and eye-opening.”

The film series was funded by PEP-Web, an online psychoanalytic library run in part from the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.

Watch the films:

• The Day’s Residues
• Diaries of the Night 
• Uninvited Guests 

Related:

• Lockdown Dreams Film Launch: Animating the Unconscious 
• UCL Psychoanalysis Unit
• UCL PALS
• PEP website
• Lockdown Dreams website