Last night I dreamt is an ongoing series of text-based animated collages built from remembered dreams.
Each piece emerges from the remains of the previous night's dream: a text written the morning after to gather the pieces and make sense of them. It then unfolds into moving image and sound. Layers shift, degrade, repeat, and interfere, following the unstable logic of the original dream.
This is my first glitch series. Not only as an aesthetic, but as a symptom, because dreams rarely hold a fixed form: they fragment, lose their shape, and slip when you try to make sense of them.
A message from my brain, and the noise around it.
The works move between narrative and disruption.
Text attempts to fix the memory and untangle it. The image refuses.
There were potatoes on my head
I was in my grandparents' bathroom. Toilet-paper-pink ceramic sink and a matching bathtub.
Looking in the mirror, I noticed my hair was sparse on the top, as if I was balding 10 cm on each side of the middle part. Because I am short, I felt self-conscious: anyone could see it.
Considering shaving my head, I looked closer and noticed that my skull was actually pretty pointy and irregular, cone-shaped, not even symmetrical, not a pretty Natalie Portman kind of skull, and I was going to look ugly if I shaved.
I looked closer again and noticed that my full scalp was actually covered with potatoes the size of a rice grain. I was grossed out and started scraping them when I noticed there was soil coming as well. My scalp was a mini potato field, with the potatoes outside the soil.
There was also soil and broken bricks in both the sink and the bathtub, and they were both half full with this "construction site" mix. I noted to myself that I knew my family wasn't big on hygiene, but that was quite gross.
Then I looked again at the top of my skull and noticed that instead of hair, there were actually a few sparse and frail resinous trees, like a tiny forest ecosystem, but weak. There was not nothing. It was quite touching, and a little sad.
A tiger cub bit my nose
I was at some fair, the kind where people casually exhibited super random things. Someone was showing tiger cubs. They were small and cute, but clearly did not belong there. The whole situation felt irresponsible, like people were ignoring safety just because things looked Instagram-friendly.
One cub jumped on me. Not aggressively, almost playfully, biting softly at my nose. It did not really hurt, but it latched on. And it would not let go.
So now it was my problem.
I tried to pull away, to get it off me, but it would not let go. The situation felt both ridiculous and serious at the same time. I did not choose this, I did not want it, and yet I was the one dealing with it.
I realised I could lose my nose.
That was when it became scary. Not panic, but this sharp awareness that something small and helpless could actually hurt me.
I couldn't pick up the pieces
I was in a foreign room filled with stuff; the tone was dark, brownish-pink. There was a girl who was my ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend, reading aloud a diary I had written when I was 11–12. I told her it was not very nice, pretending to laugh about it, only because I was too weak to actually say that I was angry and upset, but she kept going as if she did not care, barely paying attention to me.
I tried to tell my ex-boyfriend that what she was doing was not cool. He just brushed it off, coldly replying: "That's not my girlfriend, that's my wife." And that hurt even more, like a double punch.
At the same time, I was running around the room trying to pick up old "pieces of me" (journals, books, CDs) to put in a bag as keepsakes, because I could not carry everything and I had to catch a shuttle to take a flight. I did not manage to gather everything in time, partly because of the girl, and I was on the verge of missing the shuttle, unless I chose to go empty-handed.
An ice cube tray was lodged in my back
I discovered that an ice cube tray had been lodged in my back, between my shoulder blades, and that it had been there for years, while some blue liquid — the gel you get in frozen pads — had been leaking.
The justification in the dream was that once, years ago, when I had caught the flu, I had slept with a cooling thing between my shoulders, and it had stayed there, slowly working its way in, until now.
This made me understand why I had not been comfortable, and also made me very nervous about my health, because it had been sitting on my skin, maybe even deeper inside me, for years.