38 I Had a Nightmare

I had a nightmare

Los Angeles |

USA

English

Behind the scenes

This text was born from a particularly vivid nightmare I had in Los Angeles, in the United States. I had spent the day driving through this vast city during a period of drought, before arriving at an ostentatious hotel dominated by a large swimming pool.

In my dream, unsettling figures appeared, along with a dried-out world and a deep sense of guilt. Fragments of reality blended with absurd visions. When I woke up, I quickly wrote down the images that kept coming back to me.

From these impressions, I reconstructed this deliberately nightmarish narrative. Beneath the strangeness of the dream lies a more troubling question: our responsibility in the face of the injustices and harm that humanity sometimes inflicts on others and on nature.

And perhaps also that strange unease, when we feel as though an invisible finger is pointing at us.

Echoes of the world

The English word nightmare is made up of night and mare, an old term from Germanic folklore referring to a malevolent spirit that disturbs sleep. In earlier beliefs, a nightmare was not just a bad dream, but the unsettling visit of a nocturnal presence.

English belongs to the Germanic language family, from which many common words used here originate, such as night, dream, bone, or water.

The language has since evolved differently across regions. The word water illustrates a typical difference: in the United Kingdom, the t is clearly pronounced, whereas in the United States it often becomes a sound closer to d.