IF YOU LET IT

Through the practice of lucid dreaming, and extensively analysing my dreams, I began to build a new founded awareness within the dream realm. In the waking world, I carry the burden of the physical body, but in the dream world, I am liberated from all constraints of physicality. I had a dream I was navigating a huge, multi-faceted building, which was abstractly a restaurant, school and hospital combined. ‘I saw the drive-thru which was impossible to navigate and incredibly winding. The fast-food restaurant was desolate and unfamiliar.’ (Excerpt from my dream journal). Rather than attempting to make sense of the dream, I welcomed the abstractions and the interiors I visited, albeit not physically. Using the extensive building properties of the life simulator game ‘The Sims 3’ (2009), which is incredibly reminiscent of my childhood, I recreated locations I had visited in my dreams, as accurately as I could remember them.

‘From the fast-food restaurant, I travelled the length of a concrete corridor and arrived at a coffee shop.’ Dreams lack the concept of time, space and matter, an entirely adverse state of consciousness. I recognised a paradoxical vastness that both the digital and dream world share. Much like the infinite possibilities of the virtual, lucid dreaming is a similar experience to being the only player in a virtual game. Lucidity is becoming aware that you are dreaming, which allows one the opportunity to manipulate what happens within their dream. The virtual presentation of the rooms holds an essence of the uncanny. The casting of shadows are charades and estimations made up of pixels. At first glance, many of the rooms appear real with an unsettling lack of presence and life.

‘I approached the stairs in the coffee shop which led to the reception area. The boxes were there for those waiting to be seen to climb into, in order to remain in a queue.’ Throughout the process of discussing dreams with peers and tutors, creating these digital interpretations of my dreams, and studying lucid dreaming, I began to build a stronger dream memory. I was able to make more connections within the dream world by recognising familial places or people I dreamt about. The dream world was becoming another conscious state of reality. ‘When I went up another flight of stairs, I discovered another corridor with hospital wards and unusual directional signage. Another door in the hospital corridor led to a grand library. I was instructed to use the computers, however they did not work.’ This virtual experimentation was the first step towards experimenting with mediums that would benefit and assist the direction and subject matter of my project. I was originally hesitant about tackling such a grandiose, abstract topic, but I believe the use of the virtual mirrors aspects of the paradox temporality of dreams in such a way that it enhances the transcendental essence of the mysterious dream realm.

When considering how I would render this digital space to make it accessible to an audience, I experimented with recording a first-person orientation of the space, combining the exploration of each room or corridor into a film. One reservation I had with this, however, was whether the film would be more effective if kept strictly digital. Only accessible by link on each viewer’s prospective phone or laptop, keeping this digital film in limbo whereby it never becomes an actualised product that could be presented. Considering the incomprehensible vastness of the dream realm, this was a method of presentation I experimented with.

The Mnenomic Induction of Lucid Dreams, or the MILD technique, developed by Dr Stephen LaBerge, is a method to induce lucid dreaming by repeating phrases that positively affirm what you want to happen in your dreams. ‘Creating a prospective memory intention to remember that one is dreaming’ (Aspy, 2020), subconsciously inducing lucidity, or vivid dreams, depending on what intentions you repeat. I wrote and verbally repeated personalised affirmations, recording them alongside a dreamy, reverbed track I made, meditative and repetitive. This being the audio to the film, I used it as an audible and visual induction, possibly into the world that the viewer is seeing.

The role of the viewer is to remain open-minded. They are to abandon any earthly conception of what the film may be trying to do, or what it is about. The prompts, ‘if you let it,’ and ‘the body is the accessory to the mind’, is idiosyncratic, going above one’s understanding of conscious discernibility. One should let their unconscious thoughts take the reins.

Aspy, D. (2020) 'Findings From the International Lucid Dream Induction Study', Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 11, DOI: 10.3389 (Accessed: 24 June 2022)

Maxis (2009) The Sims 3 [PC game]. Electronic Arts.