Dreams calm down our worries. We overcome extreme experiences with the flood of feelings that our mind reworks each night. During the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion, water flowed through Ukrainian dreams. Recurring rains, floods and images of the seaside from the audio archive at the Center for Urban History inspired Yevhenii Poliakov to make a collage.

“We learned to live against the current. Now, when we, the survivors, our relatives and friends, are reaching the other shore, the premonitions from our dreams become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The word ‘victory’ sounds too noisy. The silence that falls after is deafening since we are afraid of what comes next.”

Yevhenii Poliakov is an independent artist and researcher from Lviv, Ukraine

Interviews from video and audio recordings of students from the Ukrainian Catholic University, their parents and teachers. The talks took place between March and August 2022. They are part of the thirty hour audio archives ‘Diaries and Dreams of War’ at the Center for Urban History in Lviv

The project was supported by a scholarship from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna as a part of the “Documenting Ukraine” initiative.