Dreaming Violence

This essay reflects on the creation of an archive of war-related ego-documents gathered in Ukraine during the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Centered on the collaborative project Two Months of War, it documents how diaries, dreams, visual art, and testimonies served as both a psychosocial coping mechanism and a means of recording cultural trauma. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, trauma studies, and visual culture analysis, the essay explores how experiences of disrupted sleep, mediated violence, and “quiet trauma” became manifest in wartime expressions, particularly through dreams and images shared on social media. It positions ego-documents as historically valuable artifacts that bridge personal memory and collective experience, and proposes that the dreamscape offers a unique entry point into the affective and symbolic dimensions of war. Ultimately, the essay argues for the importance of alternative, embodied forms of witnessing, particularly visual and dream-based records, as a mode of resistance and cultural memory in the context of mass violence and displacement.