“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day” C.G Jung

WE ARE IN A DREAM is a short experimental documentary that combines different animation techniques to real, authentic recordings of people narrating their own recurring dreams. It’s a hypnotic journey that reflects the unconscious fears that manifest as surprisingly similar dreams and nightmares with various people.

The animation style consists of watercolor -, pencil -, coal and chalk animation mixed with digital 2D and 3D elements. The whole film is a one continuous shot with no visible cuts – everything is in constant motion and the scenes change through a metamorphosis. Like in dreams.

Directors Henna Välkky & Eesu Lehtola on ‘We are in a Dream’

The main inspiration was the strange language of dreams: incoherent spaces and time with unlogical structure. Strong emotions that don’t correlate with the narratives. And behind the weirdness lie personal feelings that we can all relate to.

Dreams have always been a great inspiration for us – maybe because of all the weirdness and strong visual language. Nothing makes sense but at the same time it all makes perfect sense (like we feel most of the time also while awake).

The best part of this project to us was all the research and the hours of material we got from people: narrating their recurring dreams and nightmares. To go through all of that was thrilling and each of the recordings could have been made into their own fascinating (and yes, very weird) films.

In the process we made at least a dozen different versions of how the story could form out – one horror version, one funny version, etc. until we found a story line we were happy with. In the end we wanted to find similarities to build a somewhat coherent story. And behind the weirdness hear personal feelings that we can all relate to.