This is my third project.  It is on the concept of sleep.  I chose to focus on dreaming.  This is the visual representation I chose to depict from the research I have done, that is posted below this.  I have chosen to work with the character images from the classic film The Wizard of Oz.  I titled the piece simply “Oz”.  In another movie, that ran on the Sci-Fi channel several years ago, called Tin Man, Oz was used as an acronym, O.Z. , standing for Outer Zone.  It was basically another realm of Earth.  When we dream, it is said we travel to another realm, so I decided “Oz” was a perfect title.  So as mentioned in my research post, back in the 1930’s when this movie was made, people mostly likely dreamed in black and white, as studies have shown.  The movie however, puts Dorothy’s real life in Kansas scenes in black and white, while her dream is in color.  So I decided to reverse that, as well as blurring out the faces of the characters, to depict the lack of detail that is said to be the reality of dreaming.  I also found it interesting that the human brain can not create new faces.  So everyone you dream of is someone you’ve seen before.  That was the first thing that interested me about using the Wizard of Oz as a theme.  All the characters Dorothy encounters in her dream and people she knows in real life. Most everyone is familiar with the end scene of the movie when she tells her family and friends “you were there, and you were there, and you”  I drew and cut out poppy flowers to border all the dream characters, because they are an iconic symbol of the movie, and also what the Wicked Witch uses to put them to sleep.

 

I’ve decided to focus on dreams for my next project, that revolves around sleep.  There are two concepts  related to dreaming that I find particularly interesting.  The first concept is the idea that people only dream in black and white, which I remember reading somewhere years ago.  But I personally know I dream in color so I decided to start researching it.  I read that only 12% of people in the U.S. reported that they dream in black and white, according to a study done in 2018. However, the majority of people who reported to dream in color are under the age of 25.  People who are 55 and over had more of a percentage that reported to dream in black and white.  This is assumed to be due to childhood exposure of television.  Older people grew up with black and white television.  When the same study was done back in the 1940s it was reported that 3/4 of people in the U.S. said they dreamed in black and white.  So since then the numbers have basically reversed.

My next concept that I’m researching is facial recognition in dreams.  It is said that the human brain can not create a new face.  You can not dream up a face that does not exist.  Even if it’s a stranger that you do not recognize, it was probably a face you were exposed to perhaps on your walk to work, or maybe on the news, or the internet. Also if you think of the people you dream about, faces are not usually detailed. If you dream about someone you know, do you know it’s them because you can clearly see their face or do you just know it’s them?

So my piece will be a visual depiction of both of these concepts together.