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Project III: Life, what is it but a dream?

To capture your dreams, memory and past.

Let them go

(Dec.13: The official photos are still in progress….)

(Dec.14: Update, the official photos may not happen this semester. I lost my camera as well as the memory disk on the bus after I took the photos. I am so sad and desperate now. Hope the transit faculty can help me get it back.)

(Dec.16: My camera is back. It was kept by the bus operator. I felt an unspeakable feeling flowing all over my body after a day’s anxiety, despreation and exhaustion. I sent him a thank you card and a box of chocolate but this never expressed my gratefulness. I think I will try my best to live a good life, that’s what I want to speak to the world. Here enjoy the photos and my experience. )

Introduction

In the universal sense, dreams, as a kind of nonexistent, invisible and subconscious things, have a deep connection with our reality and the self, and also provide great help to self-study. In project3, I would like to furtherly study the definition of dreams, how dreams work in our brains, and how dreams can be used as a therapy to heal our minds. By using my own dreams and previous research on dreams, I will try to make this intangible thing tangible to better show people the healing effect of dreams, and make people pay more attention to their mental health in a creative way.

Everybody dreams, and every dream means something, no matter how fragmentary and ridiculous it may appear. Dating back to 1220 BC, people already documented dream interpretation on papyrus. They classified the dreams in good and bad ways and describes the symbols.  

Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA10683-2

It is also a self-study tool for knowing what deep-seated in the personality of the dreamer. A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud used the analysis of dreams to understand the unconsciousness and help him to give treatment to his patients. And this project aims to give people the tangible figure of dream and help them to take advantage of dream as a special journey to creatively know about themselves

Using the concept of curation, and inspired by the originality of curation: the cabinet of curiosities, I ended up making a diorama box to represent how dream like. In this cabinet, I picked the themes and scenes that appear most frequently in my dreams and visualized them. They were my home in my childhood, tomb or death, and sex. And I found material in thrift stores, which are existing things that were owned by other humans, and restored them to give them new meanings. This could represent dream come from the existing memories and events happen in our real life and produce other shapes in our mind when we are sleeping. I also found that the process of visualizing them is also a process of resolving my nostalgia, fears and other emotions in my mind.

Exhibition View

Photos of the Cabinet

The sleeping cycle. Swing the box to make the balls go to the 5th level where our dreams take place.

Progress

(The night I lost my camera, I only had one hour sleep, I dreamt nothing. But I sensed life.)

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