Limits. Short film

The aim was to create a film that would embody the dream experience. According to Gilles Fauconnier in his book ‘Mental Spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language’, mental space is a space of imagination, the imaginary space that the speaker refers to. So anything can be the mental space, if only the person can construct or recall it from the memory. And I have chosen the dream for my mental space at this stage. But as the dream experience is very personal, and true only for one person, I couldn’t avoid making a film very personal as well.

Reading Freud and his ‘Interpretations of dreams’, I found this idea: if a dream can be analyzed through recollection of the memories that have formed it, then it should be possible to form a dream through building the train of memories, that would have connection, and form an ‘artificial dream’.

I have used my personal recent memories to filter the ones, which would occur in my own dreams, and using them, I have recreated a dream that I could have had. Using the fear of height as the starting point, I have recalled places with the same feeling to it. I have looked at the fear of height not as a phobia, but as the strong restriction of the available ‘active space’, the space where it is possible to move. It could be argued that fear of heights is quite close to claustrophobia, if looking at it from this point of view. So this idea led me to the main theme for my film: exploration of the limits (both emotional, or attached to people, and physical).