Proposal:
My third project evaluates how dreams have an effect on human beings and the realm of surrealism is mirroring the real world that we live in outside of sleep. Surrealism has always been my field of interest, and the Belgium surrealist artist Rene Magritte has been my favorite of all time. I want to dive into Rene’s concept of representations of images and dreams surrogating the physical world, and how that has reflected our psychological conditions. In my series of works, I have used representations of Rene Magritte’s famous works, Son of Man, and Golconda as tribute. I also used his idea of reflections from the mirror implying the paralleling self that is active while my physical body is sleeping. I want to romanticize the process of our brain activity with real experiences, stories, and memories that have happened in the real world.
I remember in an old Chinese saying, that what’s on your mind during the day goes into your dream at night, and people give dreams all sort of spiritual intepretations. However, a scientific way of explaining the dream is boring.
The least glamorous explanation for any dream is that it serves as a sort of data dump — a clearing of the day’s useless memories and a caching of the valuable ones. Researchers had long suspected that that process, if it exists, plays out between the hippocampus — which controls memory — and the neocortex, which governs higher order thought.
I like the romantic way of explaining dream, which are also widely shown in Surrealism. I remember when I was young and if I dream of something bad, my grandparents will confort me by saying that dreams are always opposite to what happens next. However, as I grow up, that romanticism slipped away, and always, they are just determined by the reality.
Sources: