experimental video: dream sleep

The initial inspiration and spark for my video was the colors that flash around behind your eyelids when you shut your eyes tight. From this idea I started to animate some brightly colored dots using my iPad and  the app Procreate. I started with a blank, black screen, and slowly added more dots and more colors until the screen was completely full. It began to make me think of dreams, and so it slowly morphed into a video representing the state when you are dreaming. 

As the colored dots are continually added, the speed picks up, and things get more and more chaotic. Then, at a point a peak is reached and the dots start to slow down and disappear again until there is a blank screen once more. Slowly an eye opens to birds chirping, surrounded by a sunrise. 

In McLuhan's The Media is the Massage it states that "all media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical" (26). My video does just this, mimicking the state and feeling of one in a dream, a human faculty. Another quote from the book from Wordsworth says, "the eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will" (44). Most of us cannot dictate or control when or what we dream about, it just happens. Dream Sleep reflects this and seeks to illustrate it visually.