Link to Short Film: Before Me In A Dream

A Short Film by Colm Mullen
Conceptualised by DMAPP Sharon Mc Ardle and Declan Gorman
Music Composed and Arranged by Paul Gerard Campbell
Songs by Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin

Before Me in A Dream is the final part of the Prison Notebooks trilogy. Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958) was imprisoned without trial by the Irish Free State in October 1922 for her anti-Treaty views. She kept a series of diaries over six months in Mountjoy Prison and later Kilmainham Gaol. Her papers and manuscripts were burned by Free State soldiers at the time of her arrest in 1922. Upon her death in 1958, several more of her private and literary pages were incinerated, this time by a member of her own family. Fragments of her gaol journals survive, in which she writes not only of politics and the deprivations of prison, but also describes her sleeping and half-waking dreams in which she travels beyond the walls, and at times “visions” events yet to happen. Her dream writing and vivid accounts of subconscious worlds anticipate Dorothy’s later emergence as a Gothic novelist of international renown.

The Film was kindly funded by the Bank of Ireland Together Arts Fund.

2022