A glowing, noisy silhouette standing by a bed in washed-out blue light.

Archive · Motion

Lucid Dreams

Осознанные сны

A dreamcore explainer about what the brain does at night and how to wake up inside a dream

We are used to thinking of sleep as a pause. What if it is a full reality with its own rules? This explainer looks into the brain's editing room at night: how the strict daytime “editor” hands over to a free night-time “director”, and how you can notice, from inside a dream, that you are dreaming.

Year: 2026
Role: Concept, script, art direction, compositing and edit; footage generated with Google Veo 3.1
Tools: Adobe After Effects, Google Veo 3.1 (source footage)

Poster: a dreamy blue bedroom with a tall glowing mint-and-white figure-shaped light standing over the bed, its edges fringed with pink and violet.

What if it is a full reality with its own rules?

Visual language

The footage is styled as dreamcore: soft, washed-out, slightly wrong. The key thing in every scene, a person, a hand, an eye, is covered by a moving, noisy gradient that glows, laid over a blurred silhouette. You never see who it is, only where your attention should go.

The source footage was generated with Google Veo 3.1; the silhouettes, gradients, type and edit are mine.

Close-up of an eye in cold blue light, the iris replaced by a glowing mint and pink blob.

A woman's face on an old TV in a dark room, a glowing lime-green silhouette of a person standing beside it.

A blurred person in a misty garden of white and pink flowers, their silhouette filled with a blue-to-mint glowing gradient.

A hand reaching up towards a cracked ceiling, filled with a soft pink glowing gradient.

Storyboard slide with thirteen small frames: the eye, the TV, the bed, a brain in clouds, the word граница, an airport, a question mark, a diary.

Idea

An explainer about how the brain works during sleep and about lucidity. It follows the switch from the daytime mode, a strict “editor”, to the night mode, a free “director”, and ends with the basic techniques for holding on to dreams: keeping a dream diary.

The story runs in four blocks: sleep as a “second life” with its own laws; the two modes of the brain; the moment critical thinking switches on inside a dream; and practice, memory and the diary as the ground for lucidity.

Frame: a close-up eye with a glowing mint iris in grainy blue light.

Frame: a woman asleep in a dark bedroom, a glowing white silhouette standing by the window.

Frame: toy cars glowing blue, pink, red and yellow, driving across a sunlit wooden floor.

Frame: many pale hands pushing out of a cracked plaster wall.

Frame: a hand with a ring raised in a warm hotel corridor lit by wall lamps.

Credits

Source footage: generated with Google Veo 3.1 (stated in the project presentation); concept, script, compositing, graphics and edit by me
Voice-over: Lidia Pimenova

HSE Art and Design School, BA Communication Design