In the winter of 2014 I began teaching myself to lucid dream (i.e. become conscious while dreaming) so as to begin creating performance art in my sleep. This entailed a series of experiments designed to stake reality against the dream, imposing rules and restrictions on my daily life in an attempt to trancsend the limitations of my waking reality and actively collaborate with my subconscious. Aside from my geniune afinity for exploring alternate states of consciousness, I am interested in navigating the social implications of absence, raising questions about the site of performance, and directly confronting the modern mythos of the dream -- all with a good sense of humor about what it means to be a 'dreamer'. :)

Experiments:

Phase I: Dreaming About "Transpositions: A Performance Laboratory"

Overview:
Prompted by a call for submissions to a Performance MFA group show, I propose that instead of attending the event in waking life, I will attempt to have a dream about attending.

Hypothesis:
By utilizing a deadline as heightened motivation, I should be able to achieve lucidity on demand by the end of 1 month.

Structure of Experiment:
1. Hourly "reality checks" (Jumping in the air to test if gravity is acting on me)
2. Nightly attempts at lucid dreaming
3. Visiting the space of the event (Mana Contemporary) every day for 10 days prior to the show

Outcome: I achieve lucidity 3 times during the period, but on the night of the event I dream about preparing to lucid dream about the event, and wake up in my bed just as I am falling asleep in the dream. It is 6:00pm, and the show has just begun in objective reality. I attempt to fall back to sleep, but I do not succeed. I decide that I should write letters to all of the artists in the show to appologize for not being able to experience their pieces in my subconscious.

Phase II: Prioritizing the Dream

Overview:
Out of frustration at my percieved failure in Phase I, I radically re-organized my priorities for 3 weeks so as to optimize productivity in the pursuit of attaining lucidity in the dream state.

Hyposthesis:
Perhaps I was not trying hard enough in Phase I.

Structure:
Every day must be strictly blocked out in Google Calendars.

Outcome:
My daily journal grows 10 fold in word count, my bedroom goes from historically messy to spotless, I become more familiar with the content of my dreams, my knowledge of lucid dreaming increases, but I only achieve lucidity once.

Phase III: Tunnelling the 'Vision'

Overview:
For a period of 1 week I remove my vision by wearing a sleeping mask over my eyes 24 hours of the day in an attempt to attain consistent lucidity in time for my final critique (which I plan on attending in my dream rather than in waking life).

Hypothesis:
By removing visual stimuli from waking life, I should be able to achieve lucidity through recognition of visual stimuli as dream content.

Stucuture:
Mask must never be removed from eyes for the period of 1 week*

Outcome: Although I do achieve lucidity once during this week, I become more interested in the fact that I have begun to visually hallucinate on a daily basis. Rather than helping me wake up in my dreams, this experiment has brought my dreams into waking life.

Phase IV: Chilling Out

Overview:
For an indefinite period of time I stop thinking about lucid dreaming.

Hyposthesis:
By releasing some of the pressure surrounding my attempts at lucid dreaming, I should feel refreshed, and be able to pick up my pursuit in full force at another time in my life.

Structure:
No structure.

Outcome:
In progress.

A Note on the Social Implications:
While the stated goals of each experiment thus far were related to literal dreaming (as in conscious activity during REM sleep), the incidental social and personal outcomes, which perhaps became the centerpiece of the project, were related more to the idea of life dreams. In this sense, I prioritized (at times subconsciously, at others consciously) my dreams of creating community and bridging barriers over the goals of achieving lucidity. In Phase I, this manifested as an interest in, for example, the social displacment and mild confusion created by my jumping every hour on the hour, or the mandate of travelling to Mana every day for 10 days, and how that effected not only my plans and interactions with others during that period, but my own sense of value on presence and place (i.e. the disorenting experience of repeatedly, and almost arbitrarily finding myself alone in an unfamiliar space, and the sudden familiarization of that space). In addition to this, I found that one of the most poignant revelations of this phase was the discourse created around my absence from the show, and the blurry line between the attempt being percieved as ironic versus genuine. These questions continued into Phase II as I began basically to employ capitalist techniques of time managment toward 'achieveing my dream' of achieving lucid dreaming. Aside from, or perhaps in direct correlation to, the impact that this had on my time spent with friends and colleagues, what felt important about this phase was the sense of emptiness I experienced at the end of 3 weeks regardless of the tangible progress I had made. I wanted Phase III to be something different, something which could act as a counter point to the isolation that I had felt in the last phase. While planning this phase as a final extreme push toward achieving lucidity, I was simulataneously starting to think about my real dreams, like those of love and social togetherness. In embarking on a week long journey into darkness, I found myself confronted with barriers much stronger than my temporary immobility, like, for example, the fear of asking for help. Although this phase created some tensions between myself and those close to me, I found that the navigation of these tensions in many cases actually ended up strengthening our bonds and attachments.




Documentation:
The only document I have of this project is a written journal in which I attempted to recall the most important conversations I had with people about the project, throughout the project. I intentionally wanted to avoid translating my ideas into something easily consumable, and explore a more honest approach to the ephemoral nature of art work.