Why dreams?
I'm incredibly interested in the way we experience our realities through the lens of our dreams. I like how heavily dreams can warp reality. In a dream, your garage door can lead into your best friend’s bedroom, or your high school and your college mesh into one sprawling campus. I love the aesthetic of it. Familiar landscapes get crushed together into something new and bizarre. It also fascinates me that dreams can elicit such strong emotions in people. A person can experience terror, peace, panic, euphoria-- all in a space that doesn’t exist in the real world. Dreams are intangible, yet they can carry such weight. Nothing else is like that.
What's the final project?
My greatest focus through all this is the way stress and trauma appear in our dreams. I’ve done a lot of processing through dreams, and I’ve had a lot of recurring dreams about events in my life that I hadn’t yet properly dealt with. Your unconscious mind can tell you a lot about your desires and your fears, as well as what you might be avoiding. It’s wonderful that dreams, which can seem so bizarre and arbitrary, can provide a person with something so concrete and relevant to life. The final project is a narrative essay about how I processed the pain of a breakup through my dreams, how these dreams helped or hindered me, and, ultimately, what it means to be present in my life.