2021 – A Dream Odyssey
12 months, 41 countries (by night), one pandemic
The pandemic has forced us to spend more time in introspection. Since my daily life has been restrained on most fronts, I decided to pay more attention to my nights: I thought keeping track of my dreams would help me monitor my mental health and it would be fun. Not sure about the first but, boy, it was droll.
So, it was in March 2020 when I started keeping a dream journal. Before then, I had remembered dreams sporadically. Yet, being in quarantine must have given a boost to my “dream life”, as I suddenly found myself retaining multiple sequences per night – every day. I was mind-blown.
In a year, I’ve recorded more than 1000 dream scenes, and my dream journal counts over 80’000 words – a novel.
It’s time to make some creative use of this material.
Each tile of the mosaics represents a day of this first year of the pandemic. The colour shade denote the amount of dream material that I recorded in my journal: white means no dreams, yellow indicates a few keywords, while deep blue means multiple pages of recollections. The white thread “stitches” together the days in which I had dreams concerning the COVID-19 crisis.
Copyright © 2021-2025 Andrea Valentini
andrea valentini 