Dream Rides is a short film by Petor Georgallou about co-dreaming through shared aspirations in waking hours and the bonding power of experiencing altered states individually together: traveling through a landscape, eating, sitting, riding, sleeping, and dreaming together.
Petor set out to record his riding mates’ dreams as the trip went on and make a film about trying to make them real, about how you dream differently outside and with other people. It’s a big part of what makes bike touring the ultimate activity, almost on par with making art.
Read on for his description of this project’s artistic intent…
I had a super vivid dream that a guy with long yellow teeth, leathery skin, and a gaunt face with hollow cheeks stole my gold watch. I gave it to him because I was scared not to, but then he got on a camel and was kind of friendly, and invited me back to his house, which was a tent in a scrubby dessert made from blue plastic tarps tied down with red and white braided rope. The sort of rope like the Manfrotto anchor ropes they use on film sets.
He put my gold watch in a black cast iron pot on a fire in front of the house and sat me down opposite it in an old wooden chair, and we both watched the pot boiling for hours, maybe days? I was hungry and thirsty and tired, and I started crying because I was so thirsty that I thought I was going to die. It had been weeks, but I wasn’t allowed to stand up or look away from the pot.
Suddenly, he stood up and shouted, “You see!” So I stood up, and it hurt because I’d been sitting for so long that my muscles had begun to waste away. He put his hand in the boiling water and took the gold watch out and made me eat it.
It was soft, like halfway between boiled chicken and a very moist, dense cake. I ate it all and it felt amazing. I got on my bike and rode away – and it felt amazing – like a downhill tailwind.
I was relieved because we were friends like we’d known each other forever. Before that, I was sure he intended to kill me with a dagger, and my life would surely end.
Not long after that, a load of young, tall, ripped, good-looking Germans asked me to ride the Atlas Mountains with them. I wasn’t fit enough at all, but I kind of leaned into structured riding for a month or something and bought a fake gold watch, like the one in the dream, to wear on the ride.
I have no time for anything which is just for me, so the whole thing felt incredibly decadent. I wanted to make something – it was an experiment. Before the trip, I consulted our local witch about getting help speeding up the process of dreaming, and that’s the voiceover from that conversation.
So I bought some dream herbs, and I recorded our dreams each morning to see if there was a way to try and bring them into waking life on the tour.
It didn’t work how I’d hoped because there was basically a 50/50 split between mundane work dreams and sex dreams. It seems like we were all too invested in our programming to have real dreams.
I had a horrible time, but I loved it.
Suddenly, bike touring and art feel like an emergency. There is no future, so now is the only when, and I need to die knowing I had dreams and made art and existed while I was alive; otherwise, what was the point?!
Bike touring is the best way to exist, so I had no choice.
Many thanks for watching and to the companies who hooked us up with some gear for the trip.
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