Making my Dreams Surreal!

I am very happy to have heard Beth Lily speak about how her projects have developed over time, and how it’s a trail and error process. I think it is true that it can take years to get results, and to figure out why you want or need to do something.  I didn’t think that I needed to express some of the things that haunt me on a daily basis, but I am learning that sometimes it’s necessary. This past week, I watched probably 10 minutes of news, and went to sleep to a terrifying dream Wednesday night. This was a new one of many similar recurring nightmares I have been experiencing since I was 10. I don’t know why these dreams are recurring other than it being in my subconscious. This particular dream was different than most of my usual ones. It involved witnessing and being a hostage to a terror attack, trying to contact my family without any luck, and being alone trying to defend myself with weapons I didn’t remember how to load. I knew these events weren’t real, but in my deep sleep every scenario was a tense visual reality.

This has me searching for a way to visually cast these scenarios out of my conscious to hopefully end these nightmares. I have been looking into surreal photography, and have found a few artists who styles have peaked my interest. Terra Kate is the one I have been drawn to the most out of all the ones I have found online. I can actually relate more to the depicted realities in her images, than I would have if I saw them a year ago based on my experiences.  I am interested in the dream like state, and how I could possible represent my trails into something surreal.

 Online I found an article about dream interpretation and it stated that there are 4 categories of dreams: Precognitive, Warning, Factual, and Inspirational. I think this approach will help me find a way to understand which categories my dreams fall into, and how to visually represent their abstract qualities visually.