Dancing Your Dream Awake

Dancing Your Dream Awake is a visual journey through space and time, inspired by the metaphor of life as pilgrimage. The book’s motto, a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours, speaks of venturing to the limits of one’s longing to discover life and experience all it has to offer: both beauty and terror. Created over 20 years across four continents—Europe, Asia, Africa and South America—the book is a subjective chronicle. Through close personal relationships, the photographer explored indigenous traditions, religions and customs, focusing on the universality of human experience, shared archetypes and that which unites us. Featuring 63 black-and-white photographs, the work evokes the mystery of the cycles of life. Poetic and dreamlike in tone, the sequence blends lyricism and drama, aiming to awaken emotion and reflection. Deliberate references to pictorialist and neo-romantic imagery, along with analog techniques, highlight the value of reconnecting with tangible reality in an age of virtualisation and mass culture. The title draws on the concept of “dreaming” found in shamanic traditions and post-Jungian psychology—a subtle yet vital state of mind through which we perceive both the material and spiritual realms. The world is multidimensional; when we stay connected to dreaming, we engage with its deeper meanings.