The Research
No pasa nada en el mundo real a menos que suceda en las imágenes en nuestras cabezas / Nothing happens in the real world unless it happens in the images in our heads.
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza p. 87
March 8, 2022
I seek to create is a collective rest and dream journal. I was inspired to make this journal after listening to Trecia Hersey’s guided nap meditation. Hersey is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that believes “rest is resistance.” The @thenapminsitry Instagram account is an archive that reminds me to rest and breathe often. In building this journal archive, I will create the pages out of recycled materials and have sought the expertise of my friend and fiber artist, Imani Badillo, to help me bind the pages together. When the book is complete, I will pass it around to members of the Oberlin community and ask that they respond to the following questions via poetry, drawing, audio message, stuffed animal, photograph, etc.:
What stories do you remember from the dreamworld? What dreams do you have for yourself and your community?*
*These questions are subject to change as I continue my research.
March 15, 2022
A researcher that has greatly informed the direction of my project is Sidarta Ribeiro. He is author of the book The Oracle of the Night: The History and Science of Dreams and founder and vice director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. He writes from a scientific, anthropological, spiritual and artistic perspective to answer the questions: what is a dream and why do we dream?
Dream activity occurs during the neuropsychological state, REM sleep (REM stands for rapid eye movement). The typical human sleep cycle lasts 90 minutes. Most of that sleep is defined as non-REM (NREM) sleep or deep sleep and is followed by a brief period of REM sleep. A full sleep cycle is repeated four or five times a night. Typically, REM sleep only lasts a few minutes and gets progressively longer and more intense over the course of sleeping. Towards the end of the book, Ribeiro discusses a Tibetan practice called milam or dream yoga which allows practitioners to manipulate and control their dreams. In order to achieve this lucid state, “The dreamer must consider the fact that all things, whether in dreams or waking, are in permanent state of mutation and are mere illusions, impressions that are fleeting and void of substance” (362). When milam practitioners understand that dreams are what they make them, they then learn to connect their dream to that of a divine being. Ribeiro’s research only heightened my curiosity as to how both science and art can begin to describe the elusive nature of dreams and memory.
March 22, 2022
The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.
- Charles Willson Peale
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is a commentary on truth, knowledge and the museum or archive. On their website, they detail a brief history of the museum and archive and its connection to religious institutions, humanism and wealthy individuals. The first “public” museum, according to their introduction, was “little more than formalized displays of private collections of rarities and curios, often with little regard for any meaningful order of display” and only accessible to a select few. The website, however, like the museum itself, blurs the line between fact and fiction. A project about dreams, nonetheless, asks participants and the audience to enter a realm that transcends our day-to-day lives much like The Museum of Jurassic Technology that is “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.”
April 12, 2022
After watching Sidarta Riberio’s lecture, “Does where you’re from change how you dream?” and viewing the map above, I began to think about my own surroundings and the content of my dreams. Most recently I have dreamed about life after graduation, an enchanted forest with a magical tree that towers above the rest and spending time with friends. For my map project, I return to my original project idea in which I will construct a dream journal. Instead of a collective journal that will be passed around, I have decided to make this journal a collection of my personal dreams. After learning about the importance of keeping a dream journal (LISTEN TO “the dream journal”), I realize that to fully understand its significance I must make it a practice in my own life. While I am making the seed paper and binding the book, I will build the habit of recording my dreams on the notes and voice memo app each morning. The questions I am asking myself throughout this process are: Where do I go when I dream? What stories do I tell about the dreamworld? And what are my own dreams telling me about my life in the waking and sleeping realms?
May 24, 2022
What I really appreciated about MJ Robinson’s ‘14 presentation was their discussion of emotion in research. MJ asked us to think about our personal ebbs and flows of our creative process and how those experiences inform our project.
I am a former Mellon Mays undergraduate research fellow and conducted independent art historical research for a year and a half before stepping away from my project. What I learned through that experience was that I enjoyed research but felt constrained by the way academia wants us to present and think about questions. I realized that I did not want to write twenty five pages about how and why Black artists curate their own art and image on Instagram. Instead, I want to curate exhibitions on and offline, record a podcast about the big ideas I spent hours and hours reading, writing, interviewing, scrolling and thinking about which are:
1) Although Instagram was established a little over 10 years ago, I reject the idea that Instagram is “new” technology and instead view its existence as a result of hundreds of years of racialized and gendered surveillance;
2) And the act of self-curation is both a necessity and liberatory practice in which Black artists are creating spaces outside of or beyond the boundaries society has imagined.
In many ways, my dissatisfaction with more traditional academic research inspired me to take this class, Art as Research. I am proud of the project I have created and look forward to the next iteration of The Dream Journal.
May 26, 2022
Questions I still have after three months of research:
1. How has keeping a dream journal influenced my waking life?
2. How can other mediums like installation art, film & photography and fiber art provide new avenues through which to explore my research questions?
3. How do sleep habits and traditions differ across cultures? How can we reclaim agency over our sleep and dream habits in world where we are severely sleep deprived? Read The Global Problem of Insufficient Sleep and Its Serious Public Health Implications for more information.