Saelyx Finna might be the only person who truly wants to hear about your latest dream… if you live in Akron.
In fact, she wants every last detail: What exactly did the dream consist of? Was it a lucid dream — so real you woke up in a fit? Did you smell anything funny, or feel anything that poked, prodded or soothed you?
Over the next six months, Finna, a filmmaker and communications stategist, wants to record as many dreams as possible of those living in the boundaries of Akron.
“I have been really, really curious to see what’s happening in the collective unconscious,” she told Scene. “And why not look specifically at my own literal neck of the woods?”
Calling it the Akron Dream Hotline, Finna has been growing a Jungian catalogue of what goes on in her neighbors’ minds during the wee hours of the morning. Those willing to share such midnight visions—the good, the bad, the horrific—can describe them on the Hotline’s website or phone in and leave a colorful voicemail.
Finna is planning to analyze and anonymize all the dream data Akronites send her by next spring, when she’ll be presenting her findings before debuting her next film, Under The Dream, at Nightlight Cinema downtown. It will be, her website promises, “somatic cinema exploring the multiverse of our dreaming minds.”
A publicly-culled database of dreams isn’t anything new or revolutionary. Long before scientists surveyed thousands of Americans’ unconscious thoughts during Covid-19, or the 2020 presidential election, they analyzed the dreams of the Mehinaku Indians of Brazil, in the 1970s.
Commonalities in subject and tone, dream experts say, can help us understand what people in a certain community or generation truly sense rather than what they say they feel or desire.
It’s the basis of studies by the Center for Organizational Dreaming, which has surveyed a swath of groups to determine why we buy what we buy (half of us dream about it), or why all of us are so damn stressed. A recent look into 4,340 dreams from Gen Z participants found clear common threads separating them from Millennial and Gen X dreamers—more dreams connoting “reality glitching” or the “world collapsing,” they found.
So far, “stress and anxiety” have been plaguing the Akronites who’ve told Finna about their dreams, she said. Women have shared more than men. (“Surprise, surprise,” Finna said.) Some feared being late. Others, reported being lost in a maze.
As for what it all means?
“I do get down with Carl Jung’s idea that dreams are simultaneously personal and also reflective of a collective unconscious,” Finna said. Even if they’re completely random and totally bizarre. “I think first, to start, random and bizarre to whom, right?”
“One way to start to begin to open that question,” she said, “is to start to talk about our minds at night.”
Those interested can call (330) 249-1114 or fill out a dream report here.
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