The Island’s Collective Dream   (Act II)    (2025)

The Island’s Collective Dream   (Act II)    (2025)

14 mins 50 seconds
Single screen HD video with sound

Accompanying The Island’s Collective Dream (2025), (Act II), is Act I;  A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (2025)

Both videos are part of Adam Chodzko’s The Dreamshare Seer

Watch  ‘The Island’s Collective Dream’

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The Island’s Collective Dream (2025), (Act II) shows a single dream sequence, dreamt communally by a group of people who live in the same place. It combines, mixes and condenses the 160 nocturnal dreams from the community who live on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK, who used Chodzko’s Dreamshare Seer tool to share and visualise descriptions of these dreams between 24 April 2024 and 1 Jan 2025.  All these dreams are currently floating in the Dream Cloud, clustering in positions there according to themes they share in common.
Imagine each person’s individual dream as a jigsaw piece, a fragment, which just needs its awkward edges slotting together in the right way, in relation to other pieces of this jigsaw, in order to create a whole picture.  The video focuses on the dreams’ most frequently occurring events, actions, objects, animals, people, places etc. There’s lots of steam, mazes, dogs, climbing and carnivals.  It’s been created a bit like the process of cooking where you reduce a lot of combined ingredients to create their essence.  It adds in the 160 dreams, a bit of AI to identify their commonalities, a human eye to spot those commonalities that the AI fails to detect, chance, artistic intuition; Chodzko’s folding of this social dream by others into his existing practice and subjectivity,  surrealism, and dreams’ inherently bizarre structures, etc.
It turns out that collectively, so far, there’s a pretty even mix of anxious dreams and happy dreams!
The accompanying sounds are taken from an archive of field recordings Chodzko made on Sheppey, that The Dreamshare Seer selects from, to add to each dream on the tool. (For more information on the hypnagogic and hypnapompic role of sound in The Dreamshare Seer please see this FAQ answer.)
The strange title at the end of this video is the AI attempting to write :“The Collective Dream of the Isle of Sheppey” via its own peculiar dream-like text. Hunyuan, the generative AI model Chodzko used for this work, translates his prompts to create recognisable text into its own incomprehensible alien script.  It also frequently dreams up its own elements, deviating from what is prompted, to contribute its own ‘dreams’ to this collective social dream. The Hunyuan model is visually quite different – smoother, more detailed and saturated with colour –  than the grainier, vaguer more stilted model Chodzko uses for The Dreamshare Seer. The latter’s visuality was partly chosen for its inadvertent ability to create the half-remembered, the emergent, the unresolved and fluid nature of appearance in dreams. (For more information on the visuality of The Dreamshare Seer please see this FAQ answer).  These different visualisations of the same dream descriptions is a reflection of the individual subjectivities we automatically apply when hearing any story.  Along with his wider body of work, Chodzko’s foundation for The Dreamshare Seer is the implicit question lurking behind so much of what we do; “Can you see what I see?”
The preliminary images for The Island’s Collective Dream, a hollow in the trunk of an old tree and a group weaving, were recorded by Chodzko in a Malaysian rainforest when researching indigenous dreamwork there in 2023. The folding together of imagery Chodzko recorded in Malaysia, with Sheppey’s landscapes and dreams also features in  A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ (Act I)  (2025). It employs a dream-like logic, but also suggests that both places could be looking out for, and guiding, the other.  The Dreamshare Seer tool includes a group of ‘Malaysian guides’ who are ‘overseeing’ the project.

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The Island’s Collective Dream (Act II) (2025), was first exhibited at The Dockyard Church, Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, Kent (on Imbolc, 1^st February 2024), together with Act I: A Guide for ‘The Dreamshare Seer’  (2025).

Chodzko’s performative lecture about ‘The Dreamshare Seer’ in relation to his wider practice, at Leeds Beckett University, April 2024.

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Chorus: Gretchen Egolf, with David Cook, Dave Franklyn, Oliver Edwards and Charlotte Cook.
Additional music by Angusraze.

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Thank you to the community on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK for sharing their nocturnal dreams.
Thank you to Screen South for supporting the making of these two videos.
Thank you also to Catherine Herbert, Emma Leach, Julie Bradshaw, Chris Reed, Shannon Cole, Martin Barbour, James Montgomery at Realising Designs, and Isaac Clarke.