OutLine

Nightmare Installation project Jason

Intention/Motivation

Last year I had experienced a long period of time that having dreams and nightmares almost every night. I started to wonder that how do people who suffer from their dreams cope with their feelings, and what kind of information is useful for them. I did a little research on the internet and found out that dreaming is such a lonely activity, especially for teenagers and adults who are over the age of telling nightmares to their parents and can’t find a shrink to talk to. They can’t find a proper outlet for dealing with their dreams since the content of their dreams/nightmare is such a private thing. It is embarrassed for an adult to tell their friends that he/she is bothered by his/her own nightmares simply because his/her age might seems to be too old for that. Even if they try, the responses from their friends are rarely helpful since it’s more than often that there is no one having the same experience/problem around. As a result, where ever there is a “dream interpretation” or “deal with your nightmare” tutorial, especially you-tube or other similar video sharing site, no matter how ridiculous or wrong the content might be, people are interested and almost happy with anything they can get.

Base on my observation, I found out that it is not exactly the correct interpretation people are looking for, it is the simple response and the feeling of “being taken care by expert” that people really want. In other words, it is the interactions with the authority which people consider valid that give them the sense of comfort and security. Except those who suffer from sever symptoms or disorder (which is minority on normal social networking sites ), despite it looks like they are seeking answers, people who have been only slightly troubled with their nightmares are not really looking for the perfect explanation or therapy for their unpleasant dreams. Instead, they are more into seeking for a sense of “being answered” than the answer itself. The interpretation of dream is just one of the options. I found it really interesting and decided to design a device that can interact with the dreamers and see if it can become one of the “authority” of giving answers and comfort for those who are in need.

Research/Precedents

In order to make my design valid, I have to go for psychology to get the basic understanding of dream and the nightmares. Also I need to search some prior art projects that related to my thesis. Below are some main questions I prompted and searched for:

01 Why interpret dreams?

When I did the research, it was interesting to find out all the psychologists were trying to form theories and therapeutical methods through the endeavor of interpreting dreams. According to Understanding Dreams by Mary Ann Matton (1984) p.3,p4 “….. if the message contained in a dream is not taken into consciousness …….., that is, it returns in subsequent dreams until the dreamer “listen” to it.” , ”Thus the understanding of dreams can help a person to understand human behavior, including one’s own, and to live more productively.” The author implied that dreams are the inner voice of our subconscious that requires our attention and understanding. By decoding our dreams, in which we try to listen to our “super ego” and response to it, we can regain the power of our lives.

Also, Sigmund Freud, the pioneer scientist who was the first one developed wish-fulfillment theory about dreams, called the interpretation of dreams “the royal road to a knowledge to the unconscious activities of the mind”(The interpretation of dreams, 1900). Carl Jung, another pioneer investigating the meanings of dreams and once a friend of Freud, despite disagreed with Freud and formed his own theories of dreams, had the similar emphasis on the dream interpretation.

02 What are the universal features of nightmares and how are they being interpreted?

Dreaming, including having nightmares, is not only a universal human experience, but also as one of the most regular and predictable ones. Although the plot in nightmares varies from different individuals and being influenced by many different factors such as social environments and expectations, genders and life experiences etc, there are still some universal features that are prominent in the world of nightmare.

First of all, dream is highly symbolic, being expressed in metaphor and more than often being obscure to the dreamers themselves. For most people, dreams are highly pictorial. The visions of the dreams/nightmares are basically from our waking lives. According to Nightmares and Human Conflict (1970 by John E. Mack p16): “the analysis of nightmares regularly leads us to the earliest, most profound, and inescapable anxieties and conflicts to which human being are subject: those involving destructive aggression, castration, separation and abandonment, devouring and being devoured, and fear regarding loss of identity and fusion with the mother.” Despite Freud put an emphasis on wish-fulfillment and Jones put his emphasis on the incestuous sexual content of nightmares, I found a similar point of view from different psychologists in different period of time: nightmare is more or less a matter concerned with life-and-death and driven by different level of anxiety, which often seems too obscure for the dreamers themselves to understand. Another important feature is that although almost all the visions are derived from dreamer’s waking lives, nightmares have a strong tendency to be a lot more dramatic than the waking experiences

03 What plots in nightmare are most common? Is gender or age an essential factor that differ different types of dream?

From my personal experience, I had more than 100 nightmares last year and none of them were the same. But I did found they do share some kinds of pattern: although the story was different every single time, I always ended up finding out myself in some dangerous, sometimes fatal crisis. I wondered if there are some universal plots of nightmares and how does gender or ages influence the plot since nightmares have the tendency to revive our earliest anxiety. I found this book Dreams Culture and Individual by O’nell, Carl W 1925 talk about the dimensions of differences in dream content. In the paragraph of sex-related differences, it actually talked about the universal plot and how gender effect the content of nightmare. Below are some important hightlights:

01 More characters appear in women’s dream than in men’s, but the occupational characteristics of the characters are often more explicit in the dreams of men than they are in the female’s

02Women tend to recognize more of their dream characters as acquaintances or persons know to them in wakefulness.

03Animal characters are important in dreams, and they appear with about equal frequencies in the dreams of adult men and women. However, women tend to dream more mammals while men tend to dream more non-mammals, especially birds. As aggressive themes, with which they maybe closely associated, animals are more frequent in the dreams of children than of adults. It has been suggested that animals are symbolic of others things in dream, and that animal symbolism is a childlike or psychologically primitive form of symbolism.

04Agression of one sort or another is frequent in the dreams of both males and females. Dreamers of both sexes are more frequently of recipients of the aggression from other dream characters than they are the initiators. Physical aggression is more common for men dreamers; verbal aggressions and emotional dispositions to aggression are more common for women dreamers.

05 Often the dreams of women are in houses or other types of dwellings while men’s dream are more frequently set in open spaces. Women also tend to dream more often of familiar physical surroundings than to men.

06 Girls, more than boys, tend to have dreams that connect to everyday events. There is a higher frequency of falling from height in the dreams of men than in the women’s.

Although there are more comparisons of sex-related differences in dreams, above are those I consider useful and prominent for my project. While seeing the differences, we also can conclude that universal contents in nightmares may include: characters, animals (monsters), aggression (mostly from other characters in the dream), emotional disposition, abandonment, lost of identity or love ones, falling from height and failure of meeting goals in the dream. The psychological aspects and the reasons of these plots are also useful and important, but for this project I will focus more on the interaction we are about to create, which make the interpretations not that crucial in this case.