Dream No Return

The Overkill Festival 2026: Dream No Return, will have place on November 26-29. Go to theoverkill.nl to see the program and grab your tickets.

The Overkill is a festival celebrating playful arts, video games, interactive media, role-playing games, and films as tools to engage in social challenges and build alternative futures.

The theme for 2026, ‘Dream No Return’, invites us to reclaim spaces to dream together and look critically at our hyper-productive, attention-economy context.

MORE ABOUT DREAM NO RETURN:

Following our work around playfulness and resistance, we turn this edition of The Overkill towards rest, dreaming and escape.

Because exhaustion, burnout, anxiety and overwhelm have become familiar conditions of our everyday life and work, and at the same time, our exhaustion is increasingly being turned into a market: digital “rest points,” sleep-tracking apps, sleep tourism, lucid-dream experiences and technologies promising to optimise even our dreams. In a culture obsessed with efficiency and productivity, even rest risks becoming another task to perform.

Dream No Return starts from a different question: what if play, games and playful media could help us reclaim time and space for dreaming together? How can we create moments where productivity is not the goal, where attention can wander, bodies can slow down, and other possibilities can emerge? And how can we apply these questions to ourselves—as an organisation and as a festival?

The program grows from Sickhouse’s year-long collaboration with artists, combining their practices, games, films and participatory experiments into a collective exploration of rest and dreaming.

Over the past 15 months, we worked with Jana Romanova, Sondi, Janne Schimmel’s, and Josefin Arnell.

Dream No Return is a commitment to playfulness, foolishness, letting go and necessary escapism. We are not interested in escape as a way of avoiding reality, but as a way of opening it up. Against a culture that values efficiency over needs, confuses trust with surveillance and turns even our dreams into products, we want to make room for other timelines, other bodies, other ways of paying attention.

Across the festival, these explorations unfold through four interconnected chapters: Time, Shape Shifting, Escape and Lullabies. Together, they create spaces where visitors can slow down, wander, play, transform and imagine otherwise.

For a moment, the pressure of everyday life does not have to lead the way. The other way is to make space for collective dreaming.