Dreamology is a series of design-making practices that are inspired by dream logic and sequences, which aims to offer people an alternative method to convert their mind to something tangible.
Our brains can teach themselves while we sleep. The terror and beauty of a dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life. Dreamology is dedicated to developing off-line memory reprocessing into the design-making methodology.
Practice 1: Micro Thesis
One of the challenges of this year-long journey is to create a balance between broad ideas and narrow focus.
In my case---dreams, a massive topic there seems to be no place to begin an investigation. My thesis year was officially launched with a rapid one-week project: Micro Thesis.
In my case---dreams, a massive topic there seems to be no place to begin an investigation. My thesis year was officially launched with a rapid one-week project: Micro Thesis.
This project was aimed to help me to commit to a direction that can develop over a longer duration. It’s also considered a “low risk“ way to test the validity of my idea. To narrow down the topic of the dream to a manageable scale, I decided to start with one specific dream that I had in one afternoon.
Practice 2: Shell Gas Station
Another tradition for every year’s thesis students that we are required to do a project with a Shell gas station. Honestly, I didn’t have a clear solution to what I should do with it when I first got the assignment sheet. Since it was a project that was highly associated with the specific location, so I would probably find out the answer after I actually got to there.
I chose two Shell stations in Daly City and went to the sites a couple of times to take as many photos as I could from different angles, distances, and time. I brought two cameras and one GpPro with me and tried to capture anything that caught my attention so as not to miss any important clue: The gas pump, rooftop, fences, even the car wash tunnel. I always kept switching cameras and clicking on the shutters like I was a press photographer. This photo-shooting observation didn’t stop until I got a good volume of photos in both my cameras’ memory cards.
Even though I still was not 100% convinced what I was doing this during the whole process, one thing was pretty sure that it’s quite enjoyable for me when I didn’t know what I was doing. Not to mention I was able to leave with a newly washed car with a full tank of gas.
Practice 3: Fleet in Hypnagogia
There is a borderline between waking life and the dreamland that we all traversed in the sleep. If we stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world, we will find that it is full of hallucinations both beautiful and terrifying, a mental stew of reality and fantasy.
I felt I was nowhere really, in this kind of nowhere space where all of these ideas exist.
Practice 4: Dream Logic Drawing
Our mind is like a chef with his own special recipe, dreams are basically stories and images our marvelous chef cook with the ingredients from the real world. This practice is aimed to simulate the dream logic by combining drawing and our subconsciousness when we are in different time and space.
Practice 5: Dream Poem Generator
Dreams combine verbal, visual and emotional stimuli into a sometimes broken, nonsensical but often entertaining story line. We feel intense emotions in our dreams when those same emotions have been triggered at some level in our waking life. Dreams reflect our conscious and unconscious experiences, and it’s the nature of dreams to be dramatic.
Practice 6: Déjà vu
How many of you like such experience that something seems like you have lived through the present situation before?
So I grabbed one shoe on my desk and started to make some experiment with it.
So I grabbed one shoe on my desk and started to make some experiment with it.
Practice 7: Repetition Drawing
Do you have recurring dreams? Is there something that constantly appears in your dream? Do they always look exactly the same every time you dream of them?
