Brain Zzzzz’s

In this project, I tried to portrait the state of our brain when we experience an abrupt awakening. My earlier experiment contains several channels of “dreams” overlapping on a background of a room ceiling, representing the real vision of this individual. I tried to include visual elements of a computer language that describes the symptoms and condition our body experiences during the abrupt awakening, resulting in severe sleep inertia and thus the confusing, overlapping visual signals.

After further researching and “experiencing” the process of sleep, I decided to further improve my work by including an additional concept: memories. Since the construction of dreams is closely related to our memories and experience, I decided to implement the concept of memories in my work in the form of photos and videos I have taken in the past. Although none of them were taken for an art project, it was this nature that made these pictures most suitable for representing my memories. I replaced the rather meaningless stock images in the previous composition with these “memories” and composed a video out of them which I believe is a better representation of the active process of dreaming.

The final video is composed of two segments: dreaming and awakening. The dreaming stage is represented by the previous composition shown earlier. After a short period of time, this dream is disrupted by a sudden noise from the alarm clock, forcing the subject to enter the awakening stage. The presence of sleep inertia is represented by overlapping the awaken segment with scattered sections of dream segment, creating a sense of confusion and dizziness for the audience. In this final composition, I’ve also decided to add music and sound effects to tune the exact emotion I wanted for each sequence.