Archiving Dreams in Wartimes

How did the idea of collecting dreams begin – and why dreams of displaced or traumatized people?

Mey Seifan: Actually, the original idea of working on an archive of ideas is much older than How I am Here?!. It all began with the Syrian Dreams Project, an interactive initiative that gathers late-night dreams experienced by people in states of emergency. In the wake of the Syrian revolution, my friends and I noticed something remarkable: as the demonstrations of 2011 unfolded, our dreams began to change, too. That realization became the starting point. We began collecting dreams: through social media, personal interviews, and collaborations with journalists and activists. Gradually, the archive grew, encompassing voices from across Syria and beyond. Artists and detainees, refugees on their journeys through different countries, protesters, and fighters; regime soldiers, opposition fighters, even members of Da’esh. People in safe houses. People in destroyed houses. The list kept growing, each dream adding another layer to this collective unconscious.

So, to your question of how I stumbled on the idea of creating an archive collecting trauma inscribed in dreams in war times, it was not as much personal. It was more an intuition. People often feel some sort of freedom when discussing psychedelic or near-death experiences. They do not consider these experiences as part of reality. And thus, I think, they tell you about it more freely. As for them it is not real. Or part of a normal state of mind. So, people are often unaware just of how personal the information is, they are sharing. How many very intimate details they are communicating, about their trauma.

Doing this project and collecting more dreams, I noticed that the collective experience of traumata leaves an imprint on even shape our personal dreams. Patterns emerge. Suddenly, an individual’s dream transcends singular authorship. Becomes something collective. Details may vary between individual dreams, but shared trauma, pain and memories – also of things disappearing from general culture – become apparent. As if coming from a shared, collective subconscious. Which also produces shared cravings, for instance the »longing to go home«. A very significant theme in the Syrian Dream Project and How am I here?; each time it manifests differently: in strange, funny, wild, frightening, tense, sometimes bizarre stories. Most times, bizarre. All those layers that come with it.

How do you take someone else’s story and make it your own when you work with it? How do you turn such intimate, foreign dreams into artistic material?

Mey Seifan: When you work with a story, you also take it and make it your own. I don’t feel that it’s not my story. I adapt it; I make it mine. Sometimes, when I work deeply with a dream — even a dream that belongs to someone else — I continue it in my own dreaming. I really adapt these stories. There is no distance between me and them. I know them by heart, I feel them, I imagine them, and in doing so, they become part of me. I am a very visual person, so whenever I read something, I imagine it vividly. Once I imagine it, it stays in my mind, alive and present. That’s how these stories come to exist within me, fully transformed, yet carrying the essence of their original form.

Basel, how did you join the project, and how did it become a VR experience?

Basel Naouri: I first heard about the project through a mutual friend, and I was immediately drawn to it; particularly to its focus on dreams and its connection to Syria. I have a very personal relationship with this country. I spent my childhood summers there, moving between different worlds that looked and felt distinct, but which I could not fully grasp at the time. These fragmented impressions – the textures, images and sounds – have stayed with me, quietly shaping how I think and create.

The theme of dreams resonated with me on a very intuitive level. I have long been fascinated by lucid dreaming and the strange, unclassifiable sounds that appear in dreams. Sounds that defy logic yet feel intensely real. I often try to recreate them in my compositions. I rarely succeed. But that tension; between what can be imagined and what can be rendered, is at the very heart of my artistic process.

When I met Mey and encountered the project I was deeply intrigue. It took the form of a website that allowed visitors to navigate through dreamscapes using a keyboard and mouse, entering different zones that opened onto video performances of dreams. This idea – of traveling through dreams, sound and memory – felt profoundly aligned with my own artistic experiences. But I felt that the website version was not the right way of presentation. We decided to look at the potentials of virtual reality to give the website content a lift.

How did you use VR and AI to create this dream world?

Basel Naouri: The goal was to create a dream world. VR would not be used to replicate physics, gravity, or the real world. We weren’t trying to make the audience believe this was reality. We looked at the many presentations Mey had accumulated over the years, each filled with fragments and random green-screen footage, as if opening the head of someone dreaming. Scenes were strange, unsequenced, sometimes violent, and the dream titles were mostly internal cues, guiding us through the chaos. It became clear that this project was never one person’s vision. We had to let go of trying to control everything, creating mood boards or predetermined directions. Everyone had to contribute freely.

Around that time, visual AI tools were starting to emerge at that stage, the AI tools were still learning, producing “hallucinations”: images of people with seven eyes, ten hands, and fingers everywhere. Yet that unpredictability was fascinating because we were not seeking replication.

Mey Seifan: Dreams are rarely precise; they are fuzzy, fragmented, and open to interpretation. VR, randomness, and AI became tools to help us explore that dreamlike space. It quickly became clear that we needed to use these tools, not just for experimentation, but to shape the project’s aesthetics. The challenge was how to take this collage of ideas — undefined yet strangely coherent — and turn it into a visual and experiential language. Anything we created would inevitably place the work within a genre or a specific context, so the question became: how do we craft an aesthetic that honors the dreamlike, fragmented nature of the material while giving it form?

Basel Naouri: Technically, we needed a tool that allowed us to build a world in 360 degrees. That tool was Unreal Engine, which we used to create virtual landscapes and architectural structures. This part didn’t involve AI . The focus was on imagining what was possible and experimenting with form. We decided to create a world that felt somewhat familiar, yet unfamiliar. Choices of textures, materials, and aesthetics were adjusted to spark curiosity; to make the environment recognizable but strange at the same time. Elements from the dreams were scattered throughout: a particular type of flower, a public bus in a specific color, or bunk beds etc. Hundreds of small details that recurred across the dream material. Mey and the team had filmed numerous videos without a clear end result, all with green-screen backgrounds. Some were cropped shots, some full-body, ranging from ten seconds to ten minutes. The challenge was figuring out how to sequence these fragments. In VR, the audience experiences everything in 3D and 360 degrees, which demanded a new approach.

Mey Seifan: We decided to create dance-dream performances inside the virtual world. Participants enter structures that resemble a deconstructed theater, where 2D videos play on screens embedded within the environment. To experience these performances, one must explore the world, discovering the scenes in an immersive, nonlinear way.

What do visitors actually see when they put on the VR goggles? Could you briefly describe the experience for those who haven’t seen it yet? You mentioned entering islands, what does that world of dreams look like to them?

Mey Seifan: I’ll start. The experience is built on the structure of a dream’s journey, following the scientific understanding of how dreams unfold.

Even at the very beginning, the experience guides you by hand into the dream. Before entering fully, a voice starts to explain what you are about to see, preparing you for the journey ahead. Then you are immersed in this hypnotic journey, moving through fragmented, dreamlike sequences that unfold in the virtual space. Feeling like a vast, elemental ocean, constantly shifting and unfolding around you.

Basel Naouri: The challenge was to make the experience approachable, even though the material comes from nightmares and heavy topics. Most of the audience would likely have encountered similar nightmares themselves, so we didn’t want to risk retraumatization. The goal was to trigger elements of the dreams in a way that allowed participants to confront them gradually, without overwhelming them.

From there, visitors could explore the surrounding dream world. Even if specific dreams weren’t encountered, the environment offered countless possibilities — a space with no limitations, where you could wander freely, dive deeper, or discover entirely new fragments of the dream.

Mey Seifan: Imagine an island with five structures, each distinct and far apart from one another. Not all of them resemble traditional buildings. Some float in the air, others take the form of mountains or caves. Inside each structure, there is a performance, often signaled by small elements like a blinking light, but it’s not a game or a mission. Visitors are free to choose what to explore and how to engage with the space.

Basel Naouri: The VR experience balances interaction and cinematic storytelling, offering both exploratory and guided sequences. The dream world mixes familiar dream motifs — endless stairs, sudden drops, vertigo – with Syrian aesthetic and cultural elements. Sound layers, from birds to ambient noise, enhance immersion. Sound plays a crucial role, blending subtle layers of birds, planes, and ambient noise to make the environment tangible and immersive. Human figures appear throughout the world, often performing distressing or symbolic actions. A soldier cries; people wait in a food line that plunges deep underwater, eventually turning into statues. These moments convey layered meanings, yet visitors are free to simply linger, observe, and experience the environment at their own pace.

AI was used late in the process to unify the visual aesthetic. Green-screen footage was processed in small increments, four seconds at a time, guided by text-based prompts to ensure consistency with the dreamlike style. Hundreds of attempts were often required to create even a single four-second segment, which was then integrated into longer sequences with dedicated direction and sound design. In essence, the project contains countless mini-projects within it, each contributing to a larger, cohesive dream world.

Five months seems incredibly fast for a project of this scale. How was that even possible?

Mey Seifan: The only way it worked was complete trust in each person and giving everyone agency over their part of the process. There were directions, attempts at redoing things, but mostly it was about letting go and making things happen, seeing how it all came together. After the first release, we learned a lot through testing, which led to the development of the movie version and another version that was more practical and easier to navigate.

Basel Naouri: Creating the mood boards was a very intuitive process. We gathered the dreams, and I connected them to my own relationship with Syria: the streets, the architecture. The rest of the SlowFuture team included Sohrab Samsam and Riccardo Torresi who had no direct connection to the culture, but they shared a similar approach to media. Sohrab, the Iranian team member, was a genius in coming up with techniques we used, and he brought in subtle connections to Iranian architecture and culture.

We merged all these fragments and looked at the earlier mood boards from Mey, which felt like an extension of the same ideas. The ocean, exploration, the feeling of being immersed in a dream. For example, one dream described the persons living in a swimming pool,constantly swimming to survive. That torment and necessity of motion became central to the experience, directly influencing elements in the VR world. The team channeled everything intuitively into the world, adding layers without taking anything away from the story. It felt like magic.

Did you try it? Which Version did you try? The movie version or the interactive one?

The one connected to the computer. So I guess the interactive one.

Basel Naouri: In this version, the technology really takes the lead in the specifics. Things like gravity, positioning, how much sound reaches certain areas. There are moments where crossing a boundary triggers the sun to set or fog to roll in. These were the details we kept refining. But the base structure was clear from the start: we wanted an island that felt slightly familiar, yet strange. Then everyone on the team would contribute their approach to these elements, and we’d choose together what worked best and integrate it into the world.

Mey Seifan: But there was always something special about this process. When you start working on a dreamlike, parallel world, extraordinaryl things begin to happen. Strange, almost telepathic connections start appearing. People seem to read each other’s minds or get the same ideas at the same time. We laughed a lot about it, and eventually it became so normal that nobody even talked about it anymore. It just became part of how the team worked.

There was so much telepathy in this project. Even in the images we created, some were very concrete, like a person pushing a wall or someone hanging from a balcony.

Crazily enough, I used those exact two figures in my last performance: there was a person for 20 minutes just standing in front of a wall, walking and pushing it. Exactly the same movement, same gesture, same figure as the images the team came up. Though, none of the team had even seen them before – no record, no video no anything – but somehow very concrete images appeared. These things happened all the time, without discussion. It just… emerged. And I really enjoy that. When you trust the process, there’s this connection that feels like it’s happening in a parallel universe. I totally believe in that.

Basel Naouri: Maybe as a final thought, my whole world of design is usually based on structured processes. Personally, you can be chaotic, but in a team, you need structure to make sure you get somewhere. This project was completely different. Imagine working with a collaborator, let’s call them a client for a second, who comes up with a whole new idea at night, and by morning has a third or fourth idea, seemingly disconnected. If you just take them as words, they might seem random. But somehow, they fit. They connected with something I was thinking about. It wouldn’t be surprising that we’d be discussing a war scene, and the next morning Mey’ is like, ‘I’m thinking about a mermaid.’ I was like, ‘What? A mermaid?’ But instead of disrupting the process, it was exactly what we needed to finish that area. Things just started to fall into place.

Meanwhile, the project wasn’t just the VR. We met outside the project to explore dream states, preparing audiences, recording voices of team members, and experimenting with all aspects of dreams – not just focusing on one thing—so that it could channel into the VR world.

We even filmed a last piece of motion and choreographies that we didn’t know what to do with: someone floating in a salt bath, swimming. That ended up being the most comforting place in the whole dream world—a return to the womb, a craving for protection. Overall, so many things didn’t require clarity at the start. Clarity only came at the end, in the final result. And even today, we still think about those moments and wonder, ‘Maybe this could become something…

And what remains, after waking from this project?

Mey Seifan: There’s still so much material, so many ideas we haven’t explored yet. The Bashwood experience, the time spent under Medium Grind, the sleeping journeys… all of these are threads we could follow to expand the world even further.

Basel Naouri: We’ve been working intensively on this for the last three years, and now we have so many new ways to expand opportunities. Optimizing this current version is really the result of five to six months of work. Imagine if we had another batch of these experiences. The possibilities in terms of scale, variety, and optimization are huge. Right now, the interaction is only connected to the computer, but we could explore ways to make it more transportable, more versatile.

Mey Seifan: The VR glasses themselves are evolving rapidly, and the tools are moving at a crazy pace. If we get the chance to expand on this soon, I would say: think about the dream world not beeing seen as a limited environment, but as a place where people can inject their own dreams. It could be highly interactive. It wouldn’t have to be just us responsible for it. We could create a world where people can contribute their own thoughts and visions.

Curious for more? Check out slowfuture, and tanween collective.