The Dreaming Manifest is a participatory collection of dream stories, sorted by color in order to explore the correspondences between color and sub-conscious (or unconscious) memory and experience. Visitors are invited to contribute a recent or remembered dream narrative, and to select a color that represents their story. This project builds on my ongoing fascination with dream narratives, proposing an alternate social media platform that draws connections between the varied experiences of sleeping minds.
In early 2010 I began a project to record one dream per day and post the resulting short story via Twitter or Facebook. Since I didn't expect to have a memorable dream every night, I supplemented the list with past dreams “from the archives.” I have always been a vivid dreamer. I clearly remember dreams, even from my very early childhood. I'm familiar with the bittersweet experience of waking up from a dream and feeling for a period (perhaps only moments, sometimes days) that it would be worth almost anything to get back into that world, slip back into some imaginary relationship, or see the end of the story. Sometimes my dreams are straightforward workings-out of daytime desires and anxieties, or slightly distorted reruns of recently read books or frequently watched TV shows, mixing and matching familiar characters and scenarios. Sometimes not.
The Dreaming Manifest extends and expands my personal collection of remembered dreams, offering visitors an opportunity to contribute as well as to read. I am fascinated by fictional accounts of shared dreaming and communal experiences or physical places only accessible to the sleeping mind. I am also intrigued by the logic of dreams: the random correspondences between unrelated places and objects, and the inexplicable significance attached to particular words or people by the subconscious.
Manifest Dreaming:
“Freud believed the dream to be composed of two parts. The manifest and the latent content. The manifest content can be thought of as what a person would remember as soon as they wake — what they would consciously describe to someone else when recalling the dream. Freud suggested that the manifest content possessed no meaning whatsoever because it was a disguised representation of the true thought underlying the dream.” (Wilson, 2005)
Questions or Ideas?
Alison K.
Wilson, K. (2005) Introduction to Sigmund Freud’s Theory on Dreams.
URL: http://dreams.insomnium.co.uk/dream-theory/introduction-freud-theory-on-dreams
[November, 2012]
Television designed by Matthias Schmidt und Jule Steffen from The Noun Project