Collective therapy in La Casa Encendida

[Inkriql]

“First, I see a black ball the size of a melon surrounded by a kind of pink metallic spaghetti. The surface of the ball begins to undulate. Then I am walking in a circle, in small steps, with a group of people. When going out to the bathroom someone intertwines their fingers with mine. I feel excitement. Upon returning to the room the circle has been deformed and the ground is full of golden peanuts. ”

This is the strange summary of the dream that one of the participants of the Dream Hostel performance / workshop had, last weekend at La Casa Encendida, within the Cuerpa performance festival, curated by Aitana Cordero. About fifteen people gathered to spend together Friday night and all day Saturday, sleeping and analyzing the dreams that appeared inside the skull. A total of 22 consecutive hours of coexistence, creativity and analysis, of communal dreams.

"Imagination is the language of the body," says Slovenian artist Mala Kline, who directs the activity in collaboration with Spain's Cecilia Molano. After some preliminary exercises of visualization and contact with one's breathing, with one's own body, and also after a dinner based on carrot cream with pesto with nuts and cheese, all vegan, the mats are spread across the room and arrives bedtime The participants have brought their pillows, their quilts, some to their soft and fluffy teddy bear, which we do not know if they will dream of rich jars of honey. It is rare to swarm through the cultural center at night, when it is closed, go to the bathroom or go up to the terrace to take the fresco, as in one of those films in which someone is locked in a museum.

During the night someone snores on at least three occasions. Someone has to go to sleep on a couch in the office because they can't stand snoring. For the rest, the night passes peacefully and asleep, and at dawn there are many who have had dreams that are about to gut. In the dreams and related visions, walking knights appear who drink from crystalline fountains, lysergic parties, symbols such as impossible triangles and Celtic trisqueles, distorted songs, brown dogs with curly hair, blue horses galloping towards the dreamer. "The images that appear in dreams are mirrors of ourselves," says Kline. There is talk about Kabbalah, the Bible, numerology and other types of mystical, hermetic and symbolic traditions. "We are creating a multiverse," says the artist.

Although, contrary to what Sigmund Freud thought, dream symbols are not universal, but a dictionary, a constellation, should be made for each of the people who dream. “On the scale of dreams there are from nightmares to light dreams, through repetitive dreams and clear dreams. Other dreams are just an image, which is like an answer, ”says our guide through the world of soft watches.

The method to be used, a hermeneutic of sleep, is called Opening of Dreams, within the Saphire practice, developed by Catherine Shainberg. It consists of four steps: look at the story, detect the shapes and patterns, sound the question that can be asked of the dream and finally, unravel the message, its secret. During the experience "three dreams" open up, but they are not only analyzed by the dreamers themselves but by the rest of the group as "secondary dreamers", who try to revive him in the first person to reveal their mysteries. Some of this is told in the book Capfico: Written from the belly of the whale (edited by Written to Pencil), by Kline with Molano annotations. The golden peanuts of the dream recounted at the beginning turn out to symbolize something like a sexual explosion. "Something has moved inside me," says one of the dreamers, "as if they had touched an inner key."

It is Molano who, while the activity is taking place, is making dream drawings in which what the participants are narrating is represented. In the end, a kind of collective dream is created, using Molano's drawings, belonging to three different dreams, to create a story between everyone present and in which the teddy bear also participates. Among the final reflections of the dreams analyzed are teachings such as the melancholy of being one in the Universe, the need to not judge and accept oneself, or the need to live life accepting the games and possibilities proposed (that is, smoking the joint that one of the dreamers rejected in her dream). Carpe Diem.