“The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming.”
Hearing this phrase and repeating it out loud can almost induce the sensation of slipping between states. For the Italian artist Ludovica De Santis this line, said like a mantra, was just one of the tools used in the making of Onironautica, a photographic series exploring lucid dreaming. The exploration of the human psyche has had a pull on her throughout her career. “I have always had a great sense of abstraction from reality, which is why I decided to delve into the dream dimension and its mechanisms,” she explains. The title of this series, Onironautica, comes from the Greek words for dream ‘Ὄνειρος’ and sailor ‘ναύτης’. Her entrancingly odd images take us on a journey, setting sail and cresting the waves of the artist’s unconscious.
It was a phone call with a friend that led De Santis to first try interpreting her dreams. Struggling to find ways to do this she came across Frederik van Eeden’s A Study of Dreams. Published in 1913, Dutch psychiatrist van Eeden first coined the term ‘lucid dream’ to refer to the state in which a dreamer becomes aware of a dream in the midst of dreaming. This description reads like a tongue twister or a Zen Buddhist koan, and indeed the pursuit and study of lucid dreaming dates back to ancient times. References to the activity appear across the world, rooted in Hindu and Buddhist yogic practices and popping up in the observations of Aristotle and the writings of Saint Augustine of Northern Africa.
To interpret dreams one must first immerse oneself in this world and then comes the hard part—remembering them. How then to lucidly dream? In Onironautica, De Santis is equal parts investigator and test subject. Her research has led her to try various methods. In Wake Back to Bed (WBTD) a person wakes after five hours of sleep, stays up for a short period and then returns to sleep to enter a REM state that is thought to be more conducive to dreaming. In the MILD method (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams), after waking one repeats the mantra: “The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming” and then imagines themself in a dream. Various herbal infusions of Artemisia, African Dream Root, and Galantamine, all said to increase the chance of vivid dreams, were also imbibed as exercises in her study.
Upon waking De Santis takes note of her dreams and thus begins their transformation back into images. “Sometimes I fall back asleep and the dream is no longer as vivid so the notes both written down and recorded are very important. Next, I try to mentally visualize what are the most representative elements of what I dreamed. At that point, I try to reproduce it graphically, so I make a kind of drawing. Then I look for the dream location, which is my favorite part, and finally, I recreate the ideal scenario with people and other elements.” De Santis fiercely commits to this process, searching the waking world for every part to reconstruct her memory in intricate detail. “Once I stopped a person on the street to ask them to participate in a shot: his face was similar to a stranger I had dreamed about. I felt like a freak!”
‘Dreamlike’ is an adjective that gets thrown around quite often in photography. It is a quick go-to for the kinds of images that lean towards soft, blurred edges, pastels, and general lightness. Yet anyone who has ever had a dream will recognize something more true to the term in De Santis’ work. The imagery feels cinematic in its warm tones and colors but it’s the strange details in otherwise banal settings that take a second to tease out that firmly locate us in the land of nod.
A bedroom scene reveals snakes coiled on a bed. A pair of bare feet with glossy red toenails appear but it’s the deep shadows vignetting the image and the body’s scratches that command attention until upon closer look one notices a sixth toe. In another image, a sun-bleached street scene that feels conversant with the worlds of Italian photographers Guido Guidi and Luigi Ghirri contains a door within a door within a door, pulling the viewer into a parched Wonderland.
De Santis’ expansive research process wanders across time and space, both near and far. She has looked at the analysis of dreams in Greek mythology and their role in Romanticism. She has delved into the avant-garde works of Surrealism, Dadaism, and Japanese play prints called Asobi-e. She is working with a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Ida Luisa Boccalaro, to link imaginative dream reproduction to the researcher’s academic study of sleep stages. Most recently she has been exploring the world of Artificial Intelligence.
“When I started reproducing my dreams and lucid dreams, I realized that I was emulating a creative process similar to AI platforms such as Midjourney and OpenAI,” De Santis reflects. Just as AI generates new imagery by learning from existing material it is fed, our dreams materialize out of our memories, experiences, and the characters and visual ephemera we’ve come across during waking life. “I soon began to compare my creative self to that of the ‘machine,’ observing the differences that occur when both have to generate content.” In this vein, De Santis has become more informed and comfortable in her thoughts on the artistic and political role that AI should play, explaining that “we need to shift the debate from ‘replacement’ to ‘implementation’ if we want it to be constructive for society.”
The world of Onironautica is full of subtle mysteries, teetering on the edge of our everyday world. In one image, a trio of people dressed in white hold mirrors over their faces reflecting bright bursts of sunlight. In another, teeth sit on a small plate, as if replacing a cup of coffee. The pictures are accompanied by simple captions: People use mirrors to find the right path and Giant teeth for sale at the store respectively. This directness allows a hint at the layers the dreams may be referring to but leaves an openness for us to roam in our own interpretations.
With Onironautica, De Santis has gone in search of these contradictions, reeling in a world that shimmers and vibrates into something stranger and more heightened than reality as we know it. The photographer cites André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto as an important influence: “[Surrealism] resolves the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.”
Lured into the dream world of Onironautica, one can only hope to harness their own dream sailor. As the last image fades away, it’s hard not to close your eyes and repeat: “The next time I’m dreaming, I too will remember that I’m dreaming.”
Editor’s note: This series won the top honors in the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2024. Discover all of the winners and finalists for a wide range of artful inspiration.
