Gallery of Artifacts from Vivid COVID Dreams

Image: Candace Couse

Compiler: Candace Couse

Artists: Isabella Dagnino, DeeDee Day (Denise Fowle), Caroline Holroyd, Sarah Martin, Luke Pardy, Kira Pretty, Amber Lee Williams 

Gallery of Artifacts from Vivid COVID Dreams is a collaborative, cross-community project involving students and alumni from Brock University in Ontario, and The University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. This project asked participants to respond to the recently identified phenomenon of vivid COVID dreams, related to sheltering at home during the global pandemic, and the accompanying unrelenting psychological stressors of COVID 19 (Bottary 2020). A lack of activity, and increased anxiety, combined with irregular sleeping patterns, can cause dreamers to improve dream recall, leading to mass reports of strange, vivid and memorable dreams in the time of COVID. It is hypothesized that a withdrawal from everyday environments and fresh stimuli creates a scarcity of new material for our unconscious to draw upon as it works to process heightened angst. This absence is said to result in vivid mashups between the unfamiliar “new” anxieties and themes from our past, which become the clothing we do have access to as we dress up the “new” anxiety through old fears, to establish recognition. 

Through the project, participants were invited to create self-portraits in their beds, holding a single object representing an element of a vivid COVID dream. In this way, Gallery of Artifacts from Vivid COVID Dreams is at once a document of the strange, vivid COVID dream phenomenon, a reimagining of an ephemeral moment, a second level, doubled act of interpreting the intrusive feelings we are all processing, and, lastly, a mirroring of diverse, but strongly familiar states occurring over different geographical locations simultaneously.

Bottary, Ryan et al. “Sleep Extension: An Explanation for Increased Pandemic Dream Recall?” Sleep (New York, N.Y.) (2020): n.p. Web.                                                        

Isabella Dagnino. Eagle Feather. Digital Photograph. 2020.

DeeDee Day (Denise Fowle). Donut. Digital Photograph. 2020.

Caroline Holroyd. Zoom. Virtual Photo. 2020.

Sarah Martin. COVID Reel. Dishes. Digital Photograph and Cyanotype. 2020.

Luke Pardy. Jay (my best friend). Medium Format Film. 2020.

Kira Pretty. Crystal Ball. Digital Photograph. 2020.

Amber Lee Williams. Mask 1, 2 and 3. Mask. Scanned Polaroid. 2020.

Gallery of Artifacts from Vivid COVID Dreams: Your Turn to Create!
What objects do you associate with the pandemic? Please send us a photo!

TO SHARE YOUR CONTRIBUTION WITH US, click on Outreach Activities on the main site of the Interiors platform and send us your file in Word (for text only) or JPEG (for images). (Please do not send videos or audio recordings.)

Provide your name and your email address. If you wish to use a fictive name, don’t forget to include it. Your email address will not be made public; we will use it only if we need to be in touch with you.

The curatorial team reserves the right to edit or not publish inadequate submissions.