These Short Films Celebrate Dreaming as a Key to Creativity

Behind the physical labour required of any artist – be it dancing, drawing, writing, sculpting, building, acting, or capturing the world through a lens – there’s a more imaginative, less tangible form of work we might call ‘dreaming’. Existing under the surface and inside the mind, this work is often difficult to describe to an outsider, or to justify as anything more than idleness or procrastination, but without it, the more visible products of the creative process probably wouldn’t even exist. 

The South African architect Sumayya Vally discusses this dynamic while journeying between her studio and Whitechapel – an area that would inspire her Serpentine Pavilion in 2021 – in the third installation of An Invitation to Dream, a series of films directed by Stella Scott, commissioned by NOWNESS in partnership with Moncler. “I believe deeply in the process of procrastination and dreaming,” she says. “I was often described as someone whose head is in the clouds, or whose mind is in another world.” Turning these often-dismissive comments on their head, she adds that this tendency to dream has always been a foundation for her work: “If we can imagine a world we can create it.”

Curated by Jefferson Hack to coincide with Milan Design Week 2024, the immersive exhibition An Invitation to Dream was presented by Moncler at Milano Centrale station this year, spotlighting 12 preeminent creatives in a celebration of dream states as a passage to creativity. Extending this show, Scott’s film series of the same name with Moncler hones in on three of these creatives – Vally, playwright Jeremy O Harris, and ballet dancer Francesca Hayward – and follows them through the moments where inspiration, or dreaming, takes place.

“Dreaming is a key part of any creative process and I wanted to capture the moment it happens, when we sleep, when we daydream, and when our minds wander as we travel through our everyday life,” Scott tells AnOther. In this sense, the films come together to offer an expansive sense of the artistic dreamlife, from Hayward’s dancing literally going beyond her waking life, to the sprawling, unedited thought process of Harris as he sits in on rehearsals ahead of Slave Play’s opening night in London. “As Frankie sleeps, Jeremy daydreams and Sumayya loses herself in thought,” adds Scott, “I wanted the audience to be as close as they could possibly be to the genesis of their creativity.”

For the filmmaker, this also meant getting close to each artists’ creative process herself – luckily, she says that they were all confident in pulling back the curtain and demystifying their work. While unique as individual artists, they were also “surprisingly united” in their attitude and work ethic. “They all had a dream and they all worked incredibly hard to manifest it,” Scott adds. “They understood that they had to inhabit all facets of their chosen profession, the disappointments and moments of perceived failure alongside the rewards, in order to find true growth. They did it because they loved ... They didn’t seem to expect anything for anyone, just from themselves.”

In the spirit of the films, of course, each of these successful creatives also did a lot to dispel the myth that daydreaming is a waste of time, or even that an artist has to suffer to make something great. Harris and Vally, for instance, described “filling their minds with research and inspiration” and then waiting for an idea to appear out of the melange. Similarly, Hayward spoke about familiarising herself with all the elements of a dance – the story, character, music, and choreography – until her version of the role appeared to her. “There were these unspoken feelings of trust and faith,” notes Scott, “that seemed fundamental in bringing the idea to life.”

Dreaming alone isn’t enough, of course, and Scott’s films also highlight vital elements of the real world that feed into an artist’s practice – both the physical and the imaginary – from friends and collaborators, to the geography of the places they work, to political concerns and visual stimuli. All of these coexist, the filmmaker says, and we shouldn’t let them halt the creative process, but instead acknowledge that they feed into it and help dreams come to fruition. “We shouldn’t imagine that we need consecutive hours, days, weeks to put something together,” she explains. “I don’t mean to belittle the creative process, but I don’t think we should imagine it [to be] as hard as we sometimes do, and then put it off for some future window of sacred time. Life is of course all-consuming [...] but we can keep the conversation running at all times with our creative selves and be alive to the possibility of an idea being made in any moment.”

An Invitation to Dream is a series commissioned by NOWNESS in partnership with Moncler.