A Diary Read Aloud: Desire in Dreams (Sex Love)
© Dreams (2025)
Sasha Vandecasteele explores how, with Dreams, the second part of the Sex Dreams Love trilogy, Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud delivers a remarkably subtle film that transforms the ordinary coming-of-age story into an intimate study of desire. What at first seems like a small, even banal premise (a teenage girl falling in love with her teacher) evolves under Haugerud’s gaze into a meditation on how desire takes shape, is experienced, and ultimately gets distorted by the gaze of the other.
We follow Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a teenager who tries to understand her romantic feelings towards her teacher by writing them down in a diary. This creates a space where her emotions and inner world can exist without judgment. When her mother and grandmother discover the diary, that enclosed space is broken open. What used to be an intimate dialogue between Johanne and herself suddenly becomes a public text, exposed to the possibility of being read, interpreted, and morally assessed. Haugerud, however, does not treat this moment as a melodramatic turning point, but rather as an observation of how desire, once shared, inevitably changes in character.
The premise (a young girl, a forbidden love, a discovered secret) could easily have resulted in a morally charged drama. But Haugerud refuses to psychologize or explain desire. Instead, he explores how it manifests: not as a series of actions, but as a mode of perception, thinking, and dreaming. Johanne’s infatuation is therefore not merely the subject of the film, but a lens through which we come to understand something more universal.
As such, the film adopts a phenomenological approach to desire. Rather than illustrating it through concrete actions, physical proximity, or explicit imagery, Haugerud focuses on the experience itself. The film constantly probes the boundaries between what is thought, felt, and imagined. The camera observes Johanne’s facial expressions — the way she listens, writes, and remains silent. The voice-over, composed of Johanne’s own words from her diary, forms the backbone of the film. It does not serve as explanation or commentary, but as a parallel layer: an inner voice in dialogue with the images. In this way, a delicate tension arises between what is said and what is seen, between language and experience.
When her diary is read, the film acquires a second, more ethical dimension. The words that once served Johanne as a means of self-knowledge suddenly become objects of interpretation. What once seemed a pure, unmediated experience is now filtered through the perspectives of her mother and grandmother, through social notions of what is considered appropriate. This shift reveals how desire is always embedded in social structures, in language, and in morality. The film shows the fragility of the intimate once it is exposed to the public. Yet Haugerud refuses to take an explicit moral stance or condemn the adults’ actions; instead, he allows the ambiguity to remain.
By the end of the film, Johanne remains as misunderstood as she was at the beginning. Yet rather than evoking frustration, this generates a sense of recognition. For Dreams reveals that desire is not about fulfilment, but about the continual movement between knowing and not-knowing, between closeness and distance. Haugerud’s film is therefore not only a story of forbidden love, but also a meditative exploration of what it means to desire: to live in the space between reality and dreams.
Sasha Vandecasteele (24, Gent) behaalde een master in de wijsbegeerte en in filmstudies & visuele cultuur aan de Universiteit Antwerpen, waar hij momenteel ook een educatieve master volgt. Vanuit een brede interesse in zingeving, cultuur en cinema schrijft hij met enthousiasme over thema’s op het snijvlak van filosofie en samenleving.