Director Grace Hartnett invites you to peel back the layers of your mind and delve into your subconscious in a film that explores the mystery of dreaming. The Enigma of a Dream is a conceptual short film based on the journey of the mind slipping between states of awareness and tapping into the unknown depths of the human psyche.

Grace Hartnett is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily focuses on film direction and set design. By balancing surreal science experiments against organic forms, The Enigma of a Dream becomes a stage for multiple scenes within unconscious states of being.

The Enigma of a Dream is structured around lecture recordings from Indian spiritual guide Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. One of Jung’s influencers and predecessors was Sigmund Freud. According to the father of psychoanalysis, dreams can represent desires, be an expression of our fears, or as a form of wish fulfillment. With all the technological advancements science has made in the twenty-first century, our collective understanding of dreaming has not developed much beyond Freud's original 1899 theory.

Hartnett’s scenography expresses how dreams can bring awareness to the undiscovered aspects of the mind, in contrast to waking life where thoughts are shaped by the conscious mind and confined by our perceived state of awareness.