Beyond Our Conciousness

“Beyond Our Consciousness” is a visual exploration of dreams and dreaming. This project strings the viewer through a dream-state where everything is not as it seems.

Often dreams are places where powerful emotions and desires are unleashed within the mind; an everyday setting may soon be the backdrop of a psychological minefield. The mundane transitions to the surreal in even the most “ordinary” of dreams. The dreamers mind will often self mutilate, conjuring twisted images ranging from their teeth decaying and falling out to the far extremes of the human imagination, betraying the sanctity of sleep.

Yet dreams may inversely be places of magic and fantasy, often combining both extremes of the imagination in such a vivid way that the dreamer is left questioning reality - in instances of lucid dreaming, the dreamer may only truly know by “reality testing”, attempting to focus on an object such as their own hand in order to test for irregularities.

This project, inspired by Francesca Woodman’s surrealist self-portraiture, dissects the anxieties constructed in the subconscious mind in an attempt to navigate often obscured meanings, bringing flashes of light to an otherwise shadowed state.