Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
While your dreams might feel strange or random, and unique to you (if you even remember them at all), an ongoing project by the US psychologist Kelly Bulkeley offers some insight into our most common dream experiences. Since 2009, Bulkeley has encouraged people around the world to submit the contents of their dreams to his searchable online Sleep and Dream Database, which has thus far collected accounts of some 30,000 dreams. This appropriately surreal short video imagines a composite dream as it divulges some of the fascinating insights from the database, including the food you’re most likely to encounter while sleeping (chocolate), and the person you’re most likely to come across (mother, of course).
Video by Kolja Haaf
Website: BBC Reel
video
Film and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
7 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A haunting scene from ‘Minority Report’ inspires a voyage into time and memory
7 minutes
video
Family life
The stream-of-consciousness thoughts and memories that emerge while cooking a meal
5 minutes
video
Ageing and death
We’re not the only animals that appear to grieve. What are the implications?
6 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
video
Cities
A lush, whirlwind tribute to the diversity of life in a northern English county
3 minutes
video
Work
A Swedish expat in the Philippines wonders: what’s up with people sleeping at work?
14 minutes