My interest in the worlds of dreams intensified during the Syrian demonstrations. I started a Facebook page called Syrian Dreams (Tell me what you dreamt last night). In the beginning, it was another social media page, with some provocation. What will happen, for instance, if someone dreams of being in a demonstration against Bashar Al-Assad? Will the secret police arrest the dreamer? Will they accuse the dreamer of dreaming?
Actually, the page in 2011 was full of jokes and light humor. People were telling their dreams and making fun of it. The page gradually became a documentation of dreams. Perhaps, the page would have not been there if the revolution did not take place. Actually, most of the dreams were related to the revolution or interpreted within the same realities of demonstrations, arrest, torture and triumph.
Surprisingly, many people shared some elements in their dreams; most of the 2011 dreams had the element of water in them, for instance. The reality of Syria intensified. People were dying on the streets. At the time, dreams were a collection of floating fantasies that never sank into reality. We were not escaping reality; the secret police can capture us in our dreams too. The brain wanted to endure its massive collection of fantasies, symbols and pictures. The brain can do it. It teaches us how to be prepared for reality using our imagination.

They say that children dream of being chased by wild animals, so they become aware of the mechanism of dealing with these situations. Even the muscles become ready to react instantly when reality suddenly occurs. I wonder if the 2011 dreams, the ones about water and floating, were about teaching this readiness to escape war and the Syrian secret police.
Apart from two dreams; the first was about people using the language of tanks to speak, and the second was about the dreamer being naked and used as a baseball ball, no other dreamers posted any dream on the page in 2012!!!!
I went back to my diaries and found out that I have not written any significant dream. My partner, who was in Syria in 2012, recalls that he used to dream of what he did in his day time. Nothing significant, reality and dreams were in a loop. As if there was a pause in life, 2012 was the turn from protests to war in Syria, the ultimate battle between everything and nothing.
Nothing was certain Late 2011 and 2012. People were driven to make quick choices. Being late for a second could cost a life. It was a seesaw between individual choices and collective choices. We were not understanding our reality, and perhaps this why we did not dream a lot in 2012, we were living in a surreal reality. We did not want to see the war coming; even in our dreams.
In 2013, people went back to post their dreams on the page, and the posted dreams regained their funny and bizarre images. 2013 declared an international war in Syria. It is when the regime used chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, killing 1300 people and it is when we started to hear of Daesh (ISIS). It was certain; it is war, and we cannot escape this reality.
I had this curiosity to know what other Syrians dream. The archive grew more. Through the assistance of many Syrian activists, we used other techniques to collect dreams. We used cameras, WhatsApp and personal interviews. We had dreams from Syrians detainees, refugees in camps, regime soldiers imprisoned by the opposition, unparented children, middle-class people, rebels and their wives… etc.
Those dreams came to be an answer to my personal and professional blockage. I was blocked before the revolution and I was paralysed in the first two years. What to do? How to express myself? The question beforehand is what to express and what to say?
Movement, dance and choreography are my profession. My domain is the body and its language(s). People in Syria were dancing in a challenge of death. There are armed militias that shoot demonstrators, but the demonstrators go to squares, demonstrate, dance and sometimes die. The dead thought of being dead before he dies. A body that goes to its own execution. Demonstrators go and demonstrate and dance and sadly, many die.
Yes, there is a pleasure in this collective protest and certainly there is another sort of pleasure generated from the act of dancing. But these dances have something special. Many demonstrators speak of addiction to demonstrations; addiction to this adrenaline in a demonstration; euphoria. It is somewhere between life and death – a dreamlike activity. Of course no one can know what these demonstrators talk about. You have to be there to really know and feel that sense of challenging death every weak, and then every day.
Who said that sleeping is a rehearsal of death?
Do dead people dream? Do they visit us in our dreams?
I could not join a demonstration. I did not want to get into this challenge with death. I don’t want the Syrian secret police to harm my body and to traumatise my dreams. I became an anti-everything choreographer (of course I should become anti-everything, especially when all forces and ideologies in this world, including the UN, are systemically killing Syrians). Dreams became my shelter. Later, I learned a lot about lucid dreaming; how to change our dreams and overcome our fear in the dream world. I contacted dreams research centres, and read some theories about dreams. We might share their basic fear, but we might do something about it; to manipulate it instead of letting it manipulate us.
Dreams came to answer many of my questions. If I cannot get into the reality of challenging death in a demonstration, I can, to some extent, share the impressions and the adrenaline of the demonstrators’ dreams. Therefore, we (Tanween Theatre Company), decided to use these dreams as inspirations in artistic projects. We made two short movies (Cocoon and News Dreamers) and a theatrical trilogy (Destruction for Beginners I, II and reloaded). The project is still going on, and it is open for other artists from different nationalities to use these dreams as inspiration of their projects too.
It is argued that applause in theatre is similar to the wake-up clap. We did not have loud applauses in our theatrical trilogy. The personal greetings however were very worm and interested in the project. Reactions to the play were very detailed. I never asked about the applause; partially I didn’t want to sound like being a complements fisher, and I was not seeking answers like ‘we felt so guilty in your play that it feels awkward to applause’.
But there is this small notion to avoid the applause. We do not want to be applauded. Destruction for Beginners I, II, reloaded were kind of an invitation for audience to don’t wake up us. Don’t applaud! Just watch our dreams and we will speak about them later.

Published in A Syrious Look Magazine 2016