Chimeria

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

University of Applied Sciences Europe,
Berlin/Hamburg, Germany

What if I told you that every day— or rather every night— you consistently suffer from psychosis. In fact, I’d bet you had several episodes throughout the night. Now, before you reject my diagnosis, let Sleep scientist Mathew Walker give you five good reasons, because first, “last night, when you started dreaming, you began to see things which were not there, you were hallucinating. Second, you believe things that couldn’t possibly be true, so you were delusional. Third, you become confused about time, place, and person, so you’re suffering from disorientation. Fourth, you had wildly fluctuating emotions, something that psychiatrists call being affectively labile. And then how wonderful you woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all, of that dream experience, so you’re suffering from amnesia.” Along with Walker, I have a long-held fascination with these psychotic breaks, in particular the ability of the brain to recover memories and splice them up into a new experience that is screened in our private cinema of consciousness.

To me, this chimera of recollections showcases the essence of human creativity— forming a new perspective by uniting several concepts that previously didn’t go together. And there is some evidence from Walker himself that this is one of the evolutionary explanations of dreams: enhancing creativity.

Set in my, now mostly abandoned childhood home— which has since become a regular dream space and haunt of my sleeping mind— “Chimeria” probes the dream world, retrieving glimpses of the mosaic of memories I have collected each night.