dream textures
Four books, four kinds of dream: Fear, Fortune, Pleasure, Anxiety.
Each one is bound in a material that argues its theme before you open it. Fear in black leather. Anxiety in burlap, coarse and abrasive under the hand. Pleasure in soft suede. Fortune in brushed gold card stock. The book tells you what it is by how it feels to hold.
Inside each is a set of three real dream accounts. The imagery works to evoke the emotive register of the dream and tie it back to the texture of its binding. Hinged into each binding is a quote card pulling out one detail from the account, with small insert page-flips beside it — and on the reverse, research into why you might have had this dream in the first place, and what it may be telling your conscious mind.
DETAILS
Format — Four handbound books, 5 × 7 in
Materials — Leather, burlap, suede, brushed gold card stock
Year — 2017
Status — Ongoing interest; app concept in development
Where this goes next
The idea I keep returning to is the version that doesn't fit in a book: an anonymous database of dream accounts tagged by geographic location. You could see which dream themes cluster where in the world, or find people whose dreams run parallel to your own and actually talk about them. Dreams are one of the most private things we have and one of the few genuinely universal ones, and there is no real place to discuss them with people equally interested.
The data underneath it is the part I find hardest to let go of. If you could see which dream themes dominate which regions, what would that tell us?