Dreams are often considered the gateways into the subconscious. We don’t really understand much about what they are or what their purpose is, but it seems that they know a lot more about us. It has been said that they mirror what thoughts we might have in our mind, but even more surprising is that there are shared dreams among us. When we think about it more, is there a connecting link that ties us into similar experiences of the mind? Is there an inherent social component to dreams that we can uncover?

We at Frontline Arts are interested in aiding the social connections that these dreams can have in our Migration Project, where we utilize artmaking as a process to share stories and experiences from immigrants. I’ve reached out to Camila Figueroa Restrepo (a graduate student at the New School, originally from Bogota, Colombia) to ask about her knowledge in psychology and crisis intervention and to shed some more light on the social aspect of dreams. The insight she brings into helping the Migration Project will help foster a community of healing and strong connections and help us understand more about the hidden narratives found within people:

I am Camila Figueroa, and I belong to the community of migraine sufferers in NYC. The pain became a nightmare, so I initiated concrete rituals that helped me reconcile what I couldn't explain or put into worlds. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with the language of dream and nightmares, understanding it’s the best way in which, as a researcher and storyteller (which in some way or another, we all are) I make sense of the world.

For the past 8 years, I’ve been witnessing the story of the most marginalized communities such as migrants, victims of human trafficking, and adults with severe mental illness, leading me into this journey of questioning my role as a listener.

I started a MA program in Psychology at The New School in 2019, after feeling the paperwork and the emotional burden of working under Trump’s Administration, especially during the Zero Tolerance Policy. As a Family Reunification Specialist for Unaccompanied Children, confronted with different forms of trauma in need of both comprehensive and compassionate care, I started questioning my role as a listener. Beyond writing, printing and filing, I was holding one’s migration story. A story that in most cases was being told for the first time. It was in this shelter at the north side of Chicago, where I was introduced to unique forms of silence represented by pronounced spaces in between the lines and by missing documents in a file cabinet. Whatever the reason, silences illustrate an unspoken past.

Silence in the context of memory and migration has become by far the most compelling question as a researcher. As part of the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at The New School, together with The New York Cadet Corps (Please see images for reference) and local leaders in Queens we’ve been working with families of Ecuadorian heritage to understand how their narratives of migration get passed down through generations, and the extent to which knowledge of one’s narratives is connected with well-being and better mental health outcomes. So far, we have measured well-being through standardized questionnaires and through semi-structured interviews we have documented memories of what those who migrated recall from that time, and the stories their families know about their migration history. Based on qualitative observations, what has caught my attention is how little family members actually know about their families' migration story and the extent to which a not telling-not knowing dynamic across generations prevails. Again, I’m encountering a very special quality of memory that is poorly studied: it’s quietness.

A careful reading on the theory of trauma makes it clear that being able to fully communicate is the opposite of being traumatized (Van der Kolk, 1994). But if I have learned something during these years of research, is that relying too much on quantitative data and theory can result in an incomplete picture of any psychological phenomena if it's not used reciprocally with qualitative and participatory practices. In order to peel away the layers of what humans care about, what is feared and prohibited, besides what is desired and longing, psychology as a field needs to integrate alternative methodologies for 1. accessing a variety of mental processes that don’t have quantity (e.g. silence, dreams), 2) enabling communities to understand and translate their story in a language that goes beyond words, speech, and/or text, and 3) improving connectivity between members of a community.

As far as accessing mental processes with no quantity, migrants - some of them called Dreamers- share complex narratives that are at the core of identity. The common themes between them are revealed in a language that is not part of an everyday normal talk: dreams. Aspects of nature such as dreaming, have always been aspects of scientific study. Sleep research, for instance, has clearly demonstrated that night terrors or nightmares are associated with high levels of psychological distress in the migrant population and often coexisting with other psychological disturbances such as PTSD, anxiety or depressive disorder (Richter, etl.al., 2020). Especially for western cultures, the appearance, intensity and recurrence of nightmares and sleeping patterns are of particular interest because they indicate a disturbing and significant residue in one's conscious life. However, dreams' content is usually out of scope because they are highly ambiguous and difficult to interpret. But the truth is that these representations are grounded in a complex set of “befores and afters'' framing how individuals relate to their past, present, and future. The similarities in this timeframe among migrant communities is worth listening to.

Why? Because dreams occupy a space of the in-between: between day and night, between fears and desires, between real and imaginary. Dreams are a shared language, a channel. They are fueled by stubborn emotions and memories, operating in the realm of symbols which to me, are even cooler than speech, words or text Dreams are a shared reality held for a lengthy time. Almost ⅓ of our lives, to be precise. They deserve a space of quality that holds meaning through concrete rituals which involve bringing the dream into a physical level. Thus will help us integrate our inside world and from there, transform the outside world.

Eliciting narratives through dream-sharing will help the different elements of one's story to come up to the surface and make contact with a shared reality of a community where past present and future may be connected in more ways one can imagine. Based on Tavistock group relations and social dreaming research, most people experience some relief and comfort from social dreaming groups finding it as a receptive and supportive environment able to contain one’s unconscious life. For this purpose, together with Frontline Arts and The New York Cadet Corps , we aim to create a space in the summer for migrant’s dreams to be recognized and reorganized, allowing the inner-self to be heard and integrated into a coherent narrative. Eventually, we await for a map of commonality to emerge embodied in a craft practice with paper and printmaking as the medium.

-Camila Figueroa Restrepo