A Vision is Not a Dream

Alex Yonovich (b. 1976) is a musician, improviser and composer whose main focus is experimental music. Leila Rose Bari (b. 1998) is a curator and multidisciplinary artist who works with video art, installation, and performance. In this special collaboration, the two present a multidisciplinary work centered on the disruption of consciousness and its limits. The piece looks into the mysterious phenomenon of sleep paralysis in a sensory and abstract way, as well as in a broad cultural way, as the fulfillment of Henry Fuseli’s iconic painting “The Nightmare.”

On the backdrop of an enigmatic sculptural set, the two engage in a dialogue that follows the structure of a nightmarish, laconic and nonsensical interview. In a series of questions and answers about sleep paralysis, they are both interviewers and interviewees, switching roles and losing the starting point, offering an external-internal view of the body itself, as if they were one another’s doubling illusion – replicating the mind’s experience during sleep paralysis. 

“Right before I fall asleep, or right after waking up – I’m really fully conscious… I see the room, etc., and I also definitely see – demons/hear all kinds of voices, like steps, for instance (sometimes accompanied by very scary music, like in a horror film),” writes an anonymous user in the “Ask the Rabbi” section of the religious website Hidabrut. The work “A Vision is Not a Dream” moves in an endless loop in the realm that stretches between numbness and clarity, rationality and nonsense, humor and horror.