In Dreams* is an interactive video installation about dreams and our perceptions of the imagined places, spaces, and people that visit us while we sleep. It uses first-person performance-based methods of embodiment and storytelling to create an experience of dreamer/sleeper fantasy grounded in narrative for the viewer. The installation features two monitors: on the left side I describe dreams in multiple versions of myself (as TikTok filtered subject and as AI actor), and on the right side there are image-based dream collages without sound (animation, experimental video, surreal impressions). Reclining in a dentist’s chair, the viewer watches these monitors, which are suspended from the ceiling before them. These 2 sets of dream collections are not synchronized to or illustrative of each other but are randomized so that no viewer experiences the same order or corresponding set of videos. Sound is delivered through giant custom and adjustable headphone speakers covered in orange fun fur and lined with fleshy fleece. Currently, each monitor runs a program that is approximately 30 minutes in total. I have plans to add more videos as dreams present themselves (See below for a few examples).
In Dreams is an installation that explores my dreams and how constructing them through their telling and in digital collage fixes them to media as well as conscious reality, giving them shape and form when they were previously ephemeral, indistinct, cloudy, and sometimes just beyond my grasp. Conceptually, I am interested in collaborating with my subconscious self as sleeping subject, actor, collaborator, and muse because late stage (and late night!) capitalism says get to work, even if you’re sleeping. Sleep specialists and dream scientists note that dreams are lies: we can never accurately represent them in their telling, as they form, shift, morph, and change as we remember and put words to them to describe the affective conditions of their construction and our experience of them—that to remember a dream is to always already remember it incorrectly as we come out of unconsciousness to name the ephemeral. The telling of dreams is always interpretation.
This installation continues my work with and in sleep as seen in Restless and the video essay that discusses this piece, Watch Me Sleep.
*The title is inspired by Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, as well as its use in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).
Produced as part of an artist residency for The Sociability of Sleep, an interdisciplinary research-creation project that explored the epistemologies and equities of sleep (2021–2023). This work was first shown as part of InSomnolence, curated by Marianne Cloutier, Aleksandra Kaminska and Alanna Thain, June 21 – July 13, 2023, Agora Hydro-Quebec @ Coeur des sciences, Hexagram-UQAM, Montreal.