Victoria Perez Royo
Dreaming communities is a podcast curated for the Rose Choreographic School, consisting of a series of conversations among invited artists who work with what we call in this project the “dreaming substance.”[1] Here the adjective “dreaming” does not refer solely to nighttime sleep, but serves as an umbrella term for a whole series of images that have been conceived in a fragmentary and scattered way in various disciplines and practices: memories, anticipations, daydreams and night dreams, ghosts and specters, visions, and hallucinations, among others. In this way, it is possible to connect apparently very diverse practices: forms of cinema without images physically projected on a screen, such as those practiced by Esperanza Collado and Silvia Zayas, or the performative meditations around what Marta Azparren calls “blind cinema”; the various practices with imagery, night dreams, and deep imagination developed by Mala Kline within the framework of her Institute ELIAS 2069, or the hybrid practical and bibliographical research of Erika Sprey tracing lineages between ancestral and current dream practices; research on the performativity of sleep, such as that being carried out by Rafael Frazão and Ibon Salvador; the fabulations of the body proposed by Anne Juren in her lessons on Fantasmical Anatomies through a deep physical and imaginative work; the inherited memories and social ghosts with which Silvia Zayas works; the ghostly, light modes of existence that are present in the processes of mourning, which María Jerez and Catalina Insignares deal with in very different ways; various research projects that work on the abyss between the immersive experience of sleep and its translation into words, such as various works and publications by María Salgado and Shaday Larios; practices working between fictional, personal, and dreamlike frameworks, such as that of Bibi Dória or that of Andrea Božić, Julia Willms, and Billy Mullaney in the fictional framework of The Premonitions Agency. I mention only a few of the many practices intertwined in this constellation, only those of people who participate in this podcast series or who are closely involved with it.
I find that all these diverse practices have at least two things in common: they work with images that lack a material support outside the human body, and they challenge modern colonial epistemology and ontology. Although these images can appear, be projected, and pass through our bodies and those of others, they do not have a place of their own, such as a wall, canvas, screen, or photosensitive paper, for example. Perhaps because of their lack of materiality, these images have often been despised or ignored in the modern colonial tradition. It seems that, except in fields such as art or literature, they have been relegated to a merely private existence, with an inferior status of reality, considered unreliable or barely significant. It seems surprising that this has been the case, when perhaps they precisely make up for this lack of material extension with a supplement of intensity, of intensification of the world: they are images that move, stir, excite, haunt us, wreak havoc, and circulate through powerful affective dynamics. They are images that intensely contradict the ontological distribution of the world and the role of the body in the modern colonial tradition.
Therefore, the first gesture of this podcast Dreaming Communities first and foremost aims at recognizing the existence of these images and their crucial role in forming human and more-than-human bonds and communities. It is not a question of tolerating the fact that certain people or cultures ‘believe in them’, but rather one of starting from the cosmopolitical basis that they exist (even if their status as reality is weaker than that of things in the material world) and studying the particular realm to which they belong, their logic, and their operations. The gesture of Dreaming Communities thus proposes to expand or at least complicate some of the dichotomous divisions of modernity, which determined the expulsion of these images from our world. Perhaps the most significant moment is when René Descartes creates a simplified and dichotomous ontology that divides the world into two types of beings: extended substance, res extensa, which exists materially and occupies space, and thinking substance, res cogitans, the rational activity of the mind.[2] This dual ontology completely leaves out the world of images that mediates between human beings, ignores all other entities and the worlds they make up, and forgets all the imaginal density through which we see, we breath, and which makes up the very universe in which we live. Following then Descartes' vocabulary of substances, we can say that Dreaming Communities deals with the dreaming substance, res somnians, with everything that we do not see taking up space in the world and that we do not think about rationally, but which clearly exists and shapes us, and which many other cultures have recognized in very different ways: the whole world of visions, memories, ghosts, daydreams, and nightdreams. This complex and diverse but subtle world of res somnians is the field of work of Dreaming Communities.
The images of the dreaming substance build communities. They aren't private, personal, individual, or subjective. That world of res somnians doesn't exist separately, but lives in many bodies, surrounding them, passing through them, and shaping them intimately in all their interactions. We swirl around them, they make us share emotions and memories, they facilitate transfers from one body to another, they group us around them. The expression dreaming communities thus refers to various forms of communality in and through the dreaming substance in which we dive. The first and most obvious form of community is related to the morning recounting of the images we dream, with the people who tell and listen to them, who recognise their meanings, allowing dream images to shape much of their waking lives. But there are many other forms of community that sometimes foster unsuspected communities, in which we are unaware of participating: those formed by those of us who are traversed by them, sharing the same obsession, the same memory, or similar ghosts. This does not imply having lived the same experience, but also having inherited or received a whole series of familiar images that lodge in the body sometimes even more strongly than the memories that seem to be our own. We are also brought together by the feverish excitement caused by certain images that circulate through the force of shared emotions capable of mobilising entire societies. Another one, much earlier and perhaps more fundamental form of community could be linked to a common ground that constitutes us, fossilised in very much alive metaphors, sometimes called archetypal, which may be linked to the specific disposition and form of the human body, its modes of orientation and its ways of being and feeling, organising maps to process the visible and invisible world around us. In societies that have not been completely swept away by the imperative of modernisation, other forms of community are formed, unthinkable from a modern colonial episteme that refuses to abandon the identity of the subject and its bodily limits: the one formed by the night, a shadow that transforms the modes of existence of all beings on earth, a nocturnal state in which our contours become blurred, we leave our skin and relate to each other in a suspended space-time, more complex than the linear and unidirectional daytime. These are just a few, but there are a thousand other communities that we have felt, that we have shaped, or that we have experienced in our research and practices. And in any case, there is the community that brings together the invited artists and the listening audience around this series of conversations within the framework of Rose Choreographic School, allowing us to find affinities and differences in our various ways of experimenting with the dreaming substance in which we inhabit.
The group of people participating in this podcast series have worked with the dreaming substance in very different ways, but I believe they all share something else: an experimental disposition that has unfolded over time. Each of the guests has developed contexts, projects, works of art, workshops, and laboratories in which to play with different techniques and forms of knowledge, and in which to inhabit and learn about the world of the dreaming substance in an experimental way. Each conversation is about sharing the practices developed, along with all the doubts, obsessions, and intuitions that accompany their experimental journeys.
Here I share some intuitions and ideas that trace affinities, themes, and common questions among the practices of the artists participating in this podcast series.
Perhaps a key element of all this research is its anchoring in the body. Contrary to the widespread idea that when we dream we leave the body behind, that dreams are the product of an imagination unencumbered by the body, a basic premise of Dreaming Communities is that the imagination is entirely corporeal, that the body is laden with images. The practices of the invited artists take on a place of their own: the body. This implies a very different position towards oneiric images from how psychoanalysis, phenomenology or anthropology of dreams, among other disciplines, have worked. This is the basis of Mala Kline's work, which deals intensively with the dream field. Explaining the premises of the work with The School of Images she says: ‘The imagery is the primary language of the body, the only language, which the body truly understands and responds to.’[3] The body is always dreaming, continuously, night and day, but waking consciousness takes centre stage and largely obstructs the body's continuous dream work. I think Catalina Insignares also works from similar premises in some of her massage practices.[4] She conceives of the body as a landscape full of images that can be triggered through an imaginative corporeal activation. I often think that practices such as this stem from a dissatisfaction with the limits of the impoverished corporeality inherited in modernity and from the desire to open our bodies to other ways of being and feeling, from the desire to displace, question and open up the inherited ways we have of inhabiting our bodies. I think that the figure of the shadow in María Jerez's very recent research may also be partly driven by this impulse,[5] continuing a trajectory that I feel has always been pushing and expanding the limits of perception and expectation.
The body is constantly dreaming, continuously thinking. However, these somatic dreams and the images that feed them are not subjective and individual projections, but quite the opposite: in my body, I can feel many of the other bodies that constitute me. Therefore, far from thinking of nightdreams and daydreams, our ghosts and hallucinations as solitary or private moments, many of the practices involving the dreaming substance are responsible for creating ways of dreaming together, or for revealing the thousand ways in which we have always done so. I think this is the case in several of the different practices of expanded cinema by Esperanza Collado and Marta Azparren,[6] which pave the way for the organisation of collective hallucinatory experiences with images that are not projected onto a screen outside the body, but powerfully evoked in each member of the audience without the need to look outside.
However, the dreamlike substance has always been the basic element in which we collectively inhabit. Artist Sofía Asencio, in her Acontecimiento para durmientes (2022), starts from the premise that dreams can be social events, common spaces to inhabit, shared experiences. From this intuition, she invites the audience to dream together and to reconstruct the experience together the following morning. Various dream cultures offer clues for thinking about this intuition, for example the Tzeltal, which Erika Sprey studies [7] along with many other first nations’ cultures, for whom sleep is an ontological state (never a minor experience) as opposed to wakefulness, and which involves a passive orientation: I do not dream, but am dreamed, the territory called sleep welcomes me. Dreaming is thus not conceived as a human action, nor is it an individual activity, but rather an ontological state that one enters into. As a state, dreaming constitutes a social, interpersonal world, shared with many other existences and in continuity with the daytime world. This could explain the feeling Paul Valéry referred to, of dreams that ‘seem formed to be dreamed by some other sleeper, as though they mistook the absent, and mixed defenseless souls in the night.’[8] This seems to be the case in Bibi Dória's research in which a sustained practice of visual memorisation of a film and partial embodiment of fictional characters unexpectedly leads to the surprising intuition of sharing dreams with the actress protagonist of the film.[9]
Dreams, then, do not mistake the dreamer, but rather circulate among many bodies. The images of the dreaming substance are transcorporeal. The dreaming body thinks and acts through the images it receives, which pass through it, pursue it, and shape it. It could then be said that the images of the dreaming substance do not rest comfortably in one identity and one matter, but are rather changing, metamorphic, intense, they appear and manifest themselves in different bodies. In short, their nature seems to be intervallic. The work of Andrea Božić and Julia Willlms reflects this transcorporeality and the fluidity and metamorphic logic of the dreaming substance.[10] They work following the fiction that they collaborate with The Premonitions Agency, an institution dedicated to collecting dreams and devising methods of intervening into them in order to foresee and affect waking life (or real-world) events.[11] Maybe the transcorporeality of the dream image is associated here with a piece of research that combines profound bodily experimentation, traversed by fictions and by alternative notions of time, such as those offered by quantum physics. In the reversible or multidirectional temporality of dreams, one can inhabit a dimension in which time is suspended and in which what we call the past, present and future coexist without apparent order, or rather according to other non-linear, non-unidirectional logics. This temporality is very similar to our phenomenological experience inhabiting the dreaming substance, without a before or after between desires, anticipations, memories, with images that come from multiple times and that mix with the perceptions that happen now. In this way, dreams can be understood in an oracular or programmatic way and revisited the next day to organise the actions that will be carried out, as is being developed in the research of Rafael Frazão and Ibon Salvador, among many other experiments they are conducting as part of the Situated Dreams project,[12] which is also nourished by a deep knowledge of the image cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
Many of these practices stem from a basic desire: the need to abandon a solipsistic and individualistic notion of the body and the subject. In dreams as a radical experience, but also to a certain extent in daydreams and many intermediate dreamlike states, it is not possible to assert a self, a subject identified with a cogito. The many experiences offered by dreams, if not approached from a psychological, psychoanalytical or similar perspective, but if approached as a vital experience, allow the occupation of other bodies. They allow bodies to merge, to live not from a dreaming self, but from a less defined substance, a centre of fluid concentration, a being that disperses into all things, light, scattered and surrendered. A being very different from the fiction of the modern subject, whose limits coincide with the silhouette reflected in the mirror. This ‘disaster of being’, the ‘ontological drama’ that occurs during the great dreams of the night, as Gaston Bachelard calls it,[13] can be a great opportunity to dismantle a modern corporeality that we often feel as an encagement. Breaking free from it and fabulating the body is what Anne Juren proposes with her phantasmical anatomies and striking forms of therapy based on a fictional radicalisation of Feldenkreis's work on certain organs of the body.[14]
Not only do the boundaries of bodies become blurred in dreams, but everything else that inhabits them also seems to be subject to constant transformation. What was a boat became the garden of my house; it was my mother who was speaking, but then it turned out to be me. As Erea Fernández writes, ‘only a dream resembles a dream’.[15] Everything that appears in dreams is subject to a basic principle of metamorphosis, indefiniteness and change, which also allows to relate to the dream world (everything is dreamed before, if not at the same time as it is perceived) in terms not of possession and stable identities, as modern hegemonic tradition has taught, but of loss and transformation. This allows for fabulous plasticity to experiment with the translation of the dream experience, full, intense and immersive, into language, whether through the dreamy, sleepy and intimate voice that Shaday Larios worked with Francisco Arrieta and Giulianna Zambrano,[16] or by weaving together a great common once again, in a lighter language such as it appears in María Salgado's poetry collection Salitre,[17] unstable and in motion, like all things in the dream world, incompatible with the solidity and stability of the orthodox syntax of awaken written discourse.
Perhaps the key to this instability lies in the enigmatic nature of dreams, in images that insist on appearing again and again, demanding answers, calling for action. Here, Kafka's brief definition of dreams is very apt: ‘not wholly communicable, but demanding to be communicated?’,[18] with images that urgently need to appear, even at the most unexpected moments, often arising in the midst of experiences that refuse to remain unexplained, or that refuse to be part of everyday reality. These are images that pass from body to body, demanding attention to silenced realities through seismic forms of appearance. Sometimes the dreaming substance here takes the form of ghosts, such as those that have long appeared in the work of Silvia Zayas,[19] inviting us to become aware of the way in which traumas are inherited and of the thousand forms of memory hangovers, with memories that seem to travel like the feathery seeds of dandelions, as Verónica Estay Stange suggests, continuously transmitted and shared.[20] Many images of dreams and reveries would then not be mine, but ruins that traverse time, through a memory that is even more geological than human. Enigmatic images in which I realise once again that my body is not just one, nor does it belong only to me, a body that through the dreaming substance traverses time in all directions.
There is much to learn from dreams in order to develop other relationships with our environment and with the beings around us, to open cracks in our inherited corporeality, to try to inhabit the world based on another ontology and other temporal regimes, to perceive the existence and agency of light but powerful entities of the dreaming substance. Thus here it is urgent to evoke, from a deeply vital perspective, Manari Ushigua's exhortation: ‘wake up and start dreaming’.[21]
Victoria Pérez Royo, November 2025
NOTES
[1] The wider frame of this curation is the laboratory Comunidades soñantes, part of the research project Experimenta (2024-2028) by the group Artea.
[2] René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated, Sixth meditation, 1641.
[3] Mala Kline, ‘Ethics of Dreamwork. Notes from EDEN’, in Guy Cools, Pascal Gielen, eds., The ethics of art: Ecological turns in the performing arts, Valiz, 2024.
[4] She explains this in detail in: Catalina Insignares ‘Listening to the vultures’, Performance Philosophy Vol 9, No. 2, 2024. And Catalina Insignares, Carolina Mendonça ‘Paisajes que pasan a través de la carne’, in Victoria Pérez Royo, Dácil Ortega Perdomo, eds. Las sombras de la escena. Cuerpos visibles, invisibles e invisibilizados. Eds. Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha y Ed. Universidad de Cantabria, 2025.
[5] https://mariajerez.com
[6] https://esperanzacollado.net
[6b] https://www.martaazparren.es/portfolio/cine-ciego/
[7] https://dreamingandcrafting.com
[8] Paul Valéry, The Collected Works, vol. 4: Dialogues, ‘Dialogue of the tree’, Pantheon Books, 1956.
[9] With the pieces Nome de filme (2021), Cão de sete patas (2024).
[11] Andrea Božić - The Premonitions Agency - Dream Log
[12] https://www.rafaelfrazao.com/situateddreams
[13]Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie. Chap. IV. Le «cogito» du rêveur, Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968.
[14] In her PhD: Anne Juren, Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies, https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1395394/1395492.
[16] Francisco Arrieta, Giuliana Zambrano, Shaday Larios. Escuchatorio de sueños, Recodo Press, 2023.
[17] https://m-slgd.tumblr.com/post/185404782135/salitre-2019-poetry-book-segovia-la-uña-rota
[18] Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, The Fourth Octavo Notebook, Exact Change, 1991.
[19] Especially in her last project Material Girls. https://silviazayas.wordpress.com/material-girls/
[20] Verónica Estay Stange: La resaca de la memoria. Herencias de la dictadura, LOM Ediciones, 2023.
[21] In the prologue to the Spanish edition of Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. ‘Prólogo en conversación con Manari Ushigua’, Cómo piensan los bosques. Hacia una antropología más allá de lo humano, Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2021.