Recording Ukrainian dreams in wartime.

FEBRUARY 4, 2025

In the weeks after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022, Dana, a student in Kyiv, dreamed that an artillery shell shot through her apartment window and landed on the bed. Oksana had a Zoom meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in her sleep, and asked after his health. Anastasiia dreamed of opening her fridge to find dogs’ noses, “cut off, black, still wet and cold.”

These non-combatants live far from the frontlines, yet war has invaded the most private realm of life, filling their sleep with scenes of ruin, death and surreal encounters. If a dream is a parallel reality, what can it reveal about the collective mind and political consciousness during war?

Soon after the Russian invasion, academics at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and other institutions began documenting the effects of the war on the inner lives of ordinary people. So far, more than 70 university students, most of them women, have contributed their diaries, dreams and art to the Diaries and Dreams of the War archive, led by Bohdan Shumylovych, Ihor Kolesnyk and Natalka Ilchyshyn. Their initiative joins landmark collections of dreams during war, disaster or totalitarianism, such as Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams, Jean Cayrol’s “concentrationary art” on dreams from concentration camps, and Irina Paperno’s study of Soviet memoirs, dreams and diaries.

When I first read the English translations of these Ukrainian testimonies, I worried that the act of translation might have muted certain feelings. But I was instantly captivated by these raw testimonies, which radiated loss, hope, courage, shame and terror.

In the first three months of the war, the archive collected dreams featuring air raids, fireworks, Molotov cocktails, shells, guns, railway stations, debris, drones, soldiers, bunkers, planes, concrete blockades, loudspeakers, camouflage netting, alarm backpacks, Telegram and Signal networks. In their dreams, Ukrainians revisited small villages, churches, childhood homes, the Dnipro River, Khortytsia Island, Shypit waterfall, Silpo supermarket, a branch of the Alternatyvna kava coffee chain on Stefanyka Street, Pohulyanka Park, the rivers in the Carpathian mountains. They recalled grandmothers, mothers, partners, godmothers, real and imaginary sons, sisters and brothers.

As I read, I thought of Ukrainian Nobel Prize winning Svetlana Alexievich’s work with oral histories. In Chernobyl Prayer, about the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, Alexievich wrote: “The truth is that facts alone were not enough; we felt an urge to look behind the facts, to delve into the meaning of what was happening.” With their oblique or direct references to the dreamer’s catastrophic present and uncertain future, dreams are a source of meaning making. Soon the dreamers’ voices, their heady dreamscapes and potent emotions, were accompanying my days.

On the day of the Russian invasion, February 24, 2022, Anna K. from L’viv recorded the ways dream and reality became blurred:

I heard a neighbor's voice through my sleep. She was talking quite loudly to someone. At first, I didn't understand why she spoke so loudly in the morning. But suddenly I had a dream again, in which I heard: “Anya, wake up! They started a war!” My neighbor's anxious voice woke me up. I did not believe what I heard. The thought came … “Maybe it was a dream and there is no war?” But of course, I understood that it was not a dream … I told myself that it was important to wake up, accept reality.

Other diarists described how war has altered their nervous systems and become almost normal. They recorded aching heads, shaking, burning, tight chests, sleep paralysis, nervous twitching. Here’s Mariana: “I wake up every hour covered in a cold sweat … My body trembles as if pierced by small needles.” Her young sister has grown almost fond of the air-raid sirens, which sound to her “like the singing of whales.” Recounting a dream of preparing to enter her building’s basement shelter, Stefania writes, “Oh, my dear warm dungeon.”

French writer Jean Cayrol studied the dreams of his fellow concentration camp prisoners during World War II. A dream, he wrote, was “like an almond that no one was to crack. Inside, immaculate and intact, hid the secret that allowed some to survive, along with a strange explanation of their salvation.” Many of the dreams collected in Ukraine bear this out: Dreamers return to places visited with relatives, capturing loved landscapes that are being destroyed. Some dream of possessing superhuman powers to redeem or rescue what can’t be salvaged in waking life.

In the first three months of the war, the archive collected dreams featuring air raids, fireworks, Molotov cocktails, shells, guns, railway stations, debris, drones, soldiers, bunkers, planes, concrete blockades, loudspeakers, camouflage netting, alarm backpacks, Telegram and Signal networks.

In an intriguing counterpoint to this Ukrainian project, Russian social and political scientist Karolina Nugumanova and colleagues have been collecting the dreams of Russians since the war began. Nugumanova notes a common thread in the 844 dreams recorded so far — a struggle between speaking and silence. On April 5, 2022, a 30-year-old Russian woman dreamed of a photograph of burned Ukrainians she’d seen while she was awake:

I dreamed that these people were in the space of the photograph, getting up from under the garbage that they tried to cover their bodies with, half-burnt, half-black, opening their eyes and walking around [...] I thought I saw them walk around the photograph, walk out of it, and come to my window and look at me. It was scary, but mostly sad. This great, great sorrow and eternal silence.

Though she is positioned in her dream as a witness and not a perpetrator, the woman is implicated. The dead refuse their condition, they demand her attention. “Opening their eyes” as they approach the witness, they “look at me.”

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Bohdan S.

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

In my dream, I was in a glass room with large windows — it resembled an aquarium — from which I could see the outer world, but I was safe there. Korzhyk, my cat, was with me. And suddenly, a large flock of rats came out of nowhere and started circling around the room like those tailed robots from The Matrix movie. They seemed to fly in large numbers and almost totally darkened the windows with their bodies. Korzhyk and I went to the window and saw some gray and black cats left outside, and those rats were eating them. Their screams and the constant movement of those creatures woke me up. I was wet with perspiration, and my heart was pounding. I looked through some dream books, but I found no explanation. The dream books claimed it meant a terrible betrayal.

Anastasiia I.

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

A very short dream.

I open the top door of the refrigerator (a freezer), and there's a heap of dog noses. Cut off, black, still wet and cold, but not bloody.

MARCH 3, 2022

I'm sitting in an old, Soviet-made wooden chair that sways a little but doesn't creak. I am smelling the basement stench, although I'm sitting in an unfamiliar room with green walls and very thick crimson curtains. Next to me is a shabby white table with an old white plate and a sandwich with butter and yellow caviar on the side. I had never seen yellow caviar before, let alone tasted it. I can clearly see only this plate, although I feel the presence of some older people who are trying to feed me this sandwich. I don't eat either fish or meat, so when this “dish” is brought to my face, I start vomiting. Being sick, I feel that I already have a lot of these yellow eggs in my mouth, and they are constantly cracking and crunching, which makes me feel even worse.

APRIL 29, 2022

I felt I was in the world of Skyrim [an online game in which players aim to prevent the destruction of the world] but not as in a game but in reality.

Autumn is coming, and the leaves are fading. I am the owner of the traveling theater troupe; I am responsible for the costumes in this troupe, and sometimes I play the clown on stage. My band plays in the del arte style. We drove to a strange village and decided to spend the night there because the road to the city was still long. And here we can give a performance as well.

However, there is a strange atmosphere in this place. There are few villagers and many cats. And the strangest thing is that no one in the village knows its name. As if it does not exist. Instead of people, I can see only some dark streets.

The sun is already going down. The actors of my theater troupe go to sleep in the carts in which they rode. I walk around, checking the area for suspicious persons while looking for some materials for the scenery for future production.

Suddenly, I see traces of blood. Little drops that fell under my feet. I am horrified because I saw them just as I was on my way back to my troupe. They always rehearse songs before going to bed (this is our custom), so I immediately think someone might have heard them and tried to harm them. I understand that I can barely stand up for myself, but every actor and actress for me as my family, and I am ready to kill for them, so I always carry a dagger. For self-defense.

I run following the trail of drops, and they do not disappear. They just get bigger. The sun is down, so I can't even see anything around me. My breathing is so ragged from running that I start to choke, but I keep moving. The dagger in my hand is already covered in my sweat. I am back. There is total silence. Only torches shine. I look in one cart. No one is there. Another one is empty too. The actors' clothes and personal belongings remain, but the actors are not there. Where are they?

I go to the third and last cart with fear. I open it. I take a look in. Corpses. They are all dead. Everyone has a throat cut. They are piled on top of each other. Like some old rags. My actors. One on top of another. My family. Dead.

Yelyzaveta B.

FEBRUARY 28, 2022

I saw this dream a long time ago, before the war. I sit in my apartment in Lviv, in a class on trauma studies, and there are five other people in the video call with me — several classmates and acquaintances from Kyiv and Kharkiv.

At some point, Mira, who is speaking, falls silent as if the connection is lost, and I turn my attention to the screen. I can only hear a very loud bang that someone in the video call calls a blast. I immediately know what happened: a Russian nuclear attack. Mira’s window is flooded with bright light and a loud sound. I look up and out of the window — it's mid-spring outside; the trees are boldly green; the sun is shining; the air is warm, and the light is diffused — I see an explosion on the horizon; I see the heat rising.

The light becomes more and more intense until it totally blinds me. And I think: This is the end; I wish it would end fast. The pressure inside my body grows as if I suddenly have too much oxygen, and I can burst at any moment like a balloon. And I also think: I'm already dead, we're all dead, we'll finally find out what's next, after the earthly life. Seconds pass; the pressure doesn't go down, I can't breathe, it's dark before my eyes, and I don't understand why it's so dark for so long. Perhaps the whole after-death thing will be like this: darkness and uncomfortable pressure in the chest. My last thought is how can I do without N, I have to find him.

I wake up abruptly, and for some time, I cannot breathe at all, feeling the phantom pressure in my abdomen and chest. Outside the window, the spring sun shines, the curtains are barely moving from the thin draft, and a cat sits on the windowsill and looks at birds or other cats on the street. I hear N saying goodbye to his colleagues in the other room. I go out to him and warm my hands over a cup of coffee for a long time.

Dana K.

MARCH 12, 2022

A shell flew through the window into our apartment on Zelena Street near Pohulyanka Park. Somehow, I took it in my arms and threw it on the bed. The shell looked like a rugby ball but with sharp edges.

I didn't know what to do with it, and I was worried someone might think I brought it here.

I took a sweater and tried to pick up a mine with it and take it out of the room (in reality, of course, I would have acted differently).

I walked a long way up the stairs, afraid to accidentally drop the shell.

Then I got into the forest. It looked like the one in Ryasne, where I used to live with my parents, not the one close to my home. Then I went into the field. There were children playing football and volleyball, so I went farther to put the shell away from the children. I found the bushes and decided to leave the shell there.

I calmed down.

Suddenly a bird flew up and swallowed the shell.

I was worried that the bird would explode in flight. After a while, I saw an explosion in the forest, and I thought it fell there and exploded. Then that bird flew up to me and said she just spat the shell out.

Oksana K.

MARCH 13, 2022

In my dream, I had to interview three people on Zoom. Zelenskyy was the first one. I asked him if he slept, ate and drank enough water. And if it was hard for him to be a sex symbol of the whole world. I overslept the second interview, and the third one was with [Ukrainian singer] Alina Pash.

MARCH 28, 2022

I organized a big party for my birthday. There were a lot of people, a big fat cake and loud music. Someone asked me why I was unhappy after I had been very aggressive. I replied that it was because of the wrong people there. I couldn’t invite who I wanted because of the war.

APRIL 19, 2022

In my dream, we came to my grandma to celebrate Easter in Kolomyia. We invited some guests. But they called and said they would not come. Because the police were driving around the city looking for rape victims [raped by Russian soldiers]. I was one of the victims. My mother told me that I had experienced violence and must inform the police. She said this in her regular voice. The day was very sunny.

Anastasiia B.

MARCH 18, 2022

I dreamed of an apartment that was actually an office. I came to give an interview to a man, but he just turned on the recorder, and we talked. He listened to me very attentively, took in my every word, looked very intently into my eyes and at my gestures. We went into a small corridor, and he told me that he couldn't take it anymore, that he missed his family, whom he had sent to a safer place. He cried so much, and the tears were so heavy that all my clothes were wet, as if I had come out of the sea.

Stefania K.

MARCH 23, 2022

A drone flies up to us through an open window. I'm sure such a thing does not exist, but if you asked me to draw it, I would do it with scrupulous precision to details. Totally black and smooth, it looks like a paper airplane. This technological marvel comes to us, and everyone suddenly freezes. And it flies up to me, hangs in front of my head, and protrudes a thing that can shoot. Right in my face. And I'm already shaking. And by the way, it is one of those dreams when I do not look at myself from the side, and I am a direct participant in that nightmare. And I understand that I have to freeze, not even breathe. And I can't. I’m afraid.

APRIL 2, 2022

In my dream, I can fly. And I always do it in the same way. I have to swim in the sky. Like in water. Of course, the air has a different density, so sometimes you can even accelerate. Well, this is a constant work of the body. You have to keep in mind that you are flying, stay afloat.

APRIL 6, 2022

I saw a son again. I haven’t seen him in a long time. Well, I shouldn’t start like that. I have no children, had none, and I hope I’ll never have any. I just periodically see in a dream that I have a son. I'm used to it in my dreams as I'm used to the clustered dark silhouette that sometimes pursues me on the stairs, on concrete streets and in mazes.

My son and I were in occupied Korosten. A lot of Z letters, a bombed ATB supermarket. They checked people all the time. They checked me too. They asked: Do you know the war has been going on for two years?

“Two? And I thought it was 12!” I was either talking ironically or I was lying. I listened to a shitload of “liberation” stories and pulled my son through the wreckage.

Ruta R.

APRIL 13, 2022

I am at a train station, either in the role of a reporter or a camerawoman. I document the events. In my dream I think it is either a Russian railway station or a railway station in the occupied Donbas. At the station, there is one long track. There are cars cars cars, all horrible, either rusty or burned. Someone tells me that Kyiv soldiers are hanging in a car. That is it. They are really hanging in there. All dead. Either on hooks or on ropes. Suddenly the car explodes. Debris flies everywhere. I run. I had another dream. I saw Russia. I went to some factory or hospital and filmed. Everything was so terrible, shabby, it felt bad. Then I walked the streets along some barracks and garbage heaps. I am always afraid of such dreams.

The translators of these accounts include Genyk Bieliakov, Henyk Bieliakov, Svitlana Bregman, Tetiana Fedorchuk, Yulia Kulish, Andrii Masliukh, Vitalii Pavliuk, and Mykhailo Tarapatov.