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Lecture-presentation of the project by the Lviv Centre for Urban History “Documenting Experiences of War. Diaries and Dreams of the War”.

Since February 2022, Bohdan Shumylovych, a researcher at the Lviv Center for Urban History and a lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), has been collecting war diaries with cultural studies students. Part of these stories were the dreams of the study group members. The initial thesis of this initiative was the belief that diaries, like dreams, are important documents that preserve and record the emotional states of people who directly or indirectly experience tragic events. In historiography, such recorded testimonies have been considered a special type of document since the 1950s – egodocuments. This name contains an important thesis that a recorded (sketched, narrated, sung, etc.) diary or a consciously retold dream is a subjective document that is retold from the perspective of a certain ego and at the same time remains a collective heritage. 

Modern scholars distinguish at least four theories of dreams. All of them process dreams that are manifested in the images of artworks like cinema or visual art. And this is what we will talk about: how dreams reflect the world and time, and why the dream trope is important in culture and art.