Dreamland:

Abstract

I was attracted by the interaction between dream and reality. Not long before I started my thesis, I read Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and it quite interested me. In Freud’s theory, the complete personality is composed of id, ego and super-ego. The id is the set of coordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one’s id may want to do. These three parts dominate a human’s mental life, including dreaming. Dreams have the power of censorship, which occurs when the super-ego tries to suppress the id. Freud thought the essence of the dream is the fulfillment of wishes; wishes that come from people’s instinctive desires without disguise. However, not all wishes are reasonable and achievable. To pass the censor and fulfill unreasonable wishes in a dream, a human’s brain has to put on a disguise. This is why most dreamlands look absurd, but with deep exploration, one will find out the hint of those covered wishes. The relationship between dream and reality is similar to that of a mirror and reflection. In my work, I wanted to create an environment that would depict the interaction between dreams and reality. I wished to give viewers the experience of feeling the abstract definition of “dreamland,” instead of a specific view of a particular dreamland. I chose painting and installation work as the format to build the “Dreamland” environment because visual plays a big part in dreams and painting is the best and most straightforward way to access the visual sense. Installation work has rich expressive capacity and can be suitable for representing abstract ideas. I also saw installation work as one of the current most popular art forms, so I wanted to try it in my final school project.