While we’ve all been trying to cope with a new reality – COVID-19 – in our lives, two Toronto filmmakers, Hanna Jovin and Adrian Morphy, have taken to Instagram to ask the IG community, “Have you been having pandemic-related dreams?”.
According to experts, our dreams are likely going into overdrive because of increased stress and anxiety in our waking life. Even our worst nightmares serve to help process the emotions we feel during the day, and thanks to the new coronavirus pandemic, there’s a lot to process.
Both creatives were laid off due to the pandemic and were looking for a creative way to stay busy while in lockdown. For each submission, they ask the dreamer for the most striking scene that came to mind in their dreams, and not to hold back on the bizarre elements that came with their vision. As well, the duo tries to gain some sense of what could have caused the dream, so they can create an illustration with a complete story.
According to Morphy, “We’d hear anecdotally about people having crazy dreams. We were having them, and then we started to talk to our friends, our family and realized that a lot of people were starting to have these much more vivid dreams that usual”.
One submission came from a woman who watched the movie Alien before heading to sleep. Her dream involved being on a spaceship while being chased by aliens trying to infect her. Another woman pitched a dream where she hadn’t shaved her legs in weeks. Her dream saw the hair on her legs turning into asparagus (she’d watched a cooking show the night before).
The illustrated series even has its own colour palette (purple, blue and pink pastels) in order to create a surreal, dream-like quality to those visions.
Jovin and Murphy have received over 100 submissions to date and are hoping to create an animated documentary inspired by this project once they’re able to return to work.
“It’s just another way of connecting with people, and feeling less alone,” Jovin said about the project, adding, “It turned into something a lot more meaningful.”
Follow @adrianmorphy and @hannajovin on Instagram (note, both are private accounts; you’ll need to request to have them add you).