When you dream, do you fly?

November 21, 2012 9:23 AM

Hungarian photographer David Nemcsik has created a series called the "Levitation Project" where he invites his friends to answer the question "where were you in your last dream?" and then attempts to recreate the surrealism of experience by having them float in midair at the location. [via]

More of his work can be found on his Flickr Photostream.

posted by quin (16 comments total)

Oh yes, where do I sign up to float in midair over Alexander Skarsgard's loins? MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ME.

those photos are awesome, though.
posted by elizardbits at 9:27 AM on November 21, 2012 [4 favorites]

Hey a photographer who doesn't suck.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:37 AM on November 21, 2012

I was standing up in my last dream.
posted by DU at 9:40 AM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hey a photographer who doesn't suck.

I'm interested in what you mean by that.
posted by komara at 9:54 AM on November 21, 2012

I was in some kind of football stadium that was also a neighborhood. Float me over that.
posted by adamdschneider at 9:54 AM on November 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

I was standing up in my last dream.

Trying to fly is usually the first thing I do when I realize I'm dreaming. I invariably wake up just after I get off the ground. So I read these photos as the never-quite-realized continuation.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:59 AM on November 21, 2012

Amazingly enough, there is already a Mitchell & Webb sketch that's basically covered this.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:15 AM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

1) I don't fly in my dreams

2) Most of my dreams take place in my dreamscape(s). Most of these dreams are connected in some deep way such that while they are in separate location, there is a larger geography that connects them. I have more than one of the geographies. These geographies are not merely physical locations, but emotional spaces, that contain an overbearing atmosphere that I do not experience in waking life. It haunts every sense of self in the dreamscape(s). There are similarities in the feels of these geographies, but they are slightly different between each 'scape.

3) I think the last dream I had that was at a specific RL location was where I grew up at my old school and a young child murdered a dog, and Sherlock Holmes (from the new TV show) was trying to solve the crime. The school is no longer there, but I suppose one could take a photo of me flying there, I guess. It doesn't mean much to me.

4) I guess I'll go look at these photos -I imagine they'll be nice.
posted by symbioid at 10:19 AM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

komara: I find the preponderance of photography today to be little more than masturbatory exercises with scant reference to an internal dialogue on either the part of the photographer or the audience; barely a step beyond the visual equivalent of lorem ipsum in that beyond the 0.1 second it takes to perceive there is nothing more: merely taking up space without having any substance at all -- a sweet candy shell with no apple inside.

Since you asked.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:22 AM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Those places are all so Hungarian.

But hey - all these people dream that they're in actual normal places? Most of my dreams that I can remember are science fiction plots.
posted by Michael Roberts at 10:41 AM on November 21, 2012

Since you asked.

Kind of had to, since your initial comment contained no trace of that nuanced opinion.
posted by komara at 11:02 AM on November 21, 2012

To actually respond to the post:

I have worked a few times on getting the idea of a levitating subject on film (or sensor, but you know what I mean) and never found exactly what I'm looking for. I liked Nemcsik's approach for the first image or three I saw, and then found myself disappointed by the sameness in pose. I don't claim to know how he achieved the shots, but it looks like he used the same setup in every single one, and that brings it down for me. A dream is such an individualized thing and to see all the people floating in similar poses took the power out of it.
posted by komara at 11:26 AM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

Why is no-one floating face down? Typically my floating dreams have been a form of swimming across the landscape and my backstroke sucks so it's breaststroke all the way.

..oh crap, I'm doing it wrong again.
posted by arcticseal at 11:45 AM on November 21, 2012

Another one for "I'm never in real places in my dreams" Here's some location snippets from the "dream" tag in my blog:

I was in the bottom floor of a high-security building. Maybe a mall, maybe some kind of Le Corbusieresque arcology.

There was a large room with a corridor running in a circle around it. Two ten foot tall people in fursuits were in it; they’d sewn them together at the back so there were one four-legged, two-headed Janus-beast.

I was riding my hovering cardboard tube through a narrow, dimly-lit underground tunnel.

I was in an area of a town where there were a lot of shops, and a lot of people. I was walking past what I think was a corset shop; there were some wicker cages hanging out above my head, with tied-up women in them, displaying the place’s wares. It was totally a fairy market by way of BDSM fantasy.

There was this complex/mine on an alien planet. Made by unknown hands and found abandoned, it looked like nothing more than endless institutional corridors – say, those found in a college – with occasional elevators.

...a Chuck Jones cartoon ca. 1965, concerning three characters trapped in a universe that was regularly getting thinner.

Good luck taking photographs of me in some of THOSE places.
posted by egypturnash at 12:19 PM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

The imagery resonates with me in that my dream flying works a bit like h2g2's. It's not Superman style, I just sort of carefully lift one foot up, then the other. I float like on the surface of a pool, either in a semi-sitting position or lying back as those people are.

As a kid it just made sense to me that you should be able to do that if you were gentle enough, like layering drinks. I think part of me still believes it's possible.
posted by lucidium at 5:33 PM on November 21, 2012

Yeah, alas, the hybrid high school/mall of my dreams, a.k.a. the place of many stairs, doesn't actually exist. Nor does the beautiful, ominous valley from the last dream I remember. And thank God the hellpit my friends fed an angel to in another dream doesn't exist.

Anyway, these photos are cool, but I wish at least some of the people were facing down/forward, rather than up/back—when I fly in my dreams, I can see where I'm going.
posted by limeonaire at 7:41 PM on November 21, 2012 [1 favorite]