Since early 2019, I’ve been keeping a dream journal on my phone. The original impetus was to better remember my dreams—to be able to hold on to those fleeting fragments I remembered upon waking, and, over time, to be more conscious of them. The practice of logging did in fact help me remember more of my dreams with more frequency, but until now I haven’t spent any time revisiting those entries.
For this project, In Dreams I Walk With You, I used data visualization to explore one particular aspect of those dreams: who I spend time with on the astral plane. The title for this project is taken from the lyrics of the song “In Dreams,” by Roy Orbison, in which the narrator describes a relationship with the love of his life that exists “only in dreams”—in his waking life they are separated. For myself, and I imagine many others, the relationships in my dreams are not tied to the temporal reality of my day to day. In dreams I spend time with childhood friends, former lovers, family members living and dead, strangers, and people near and far from me in real life.
My goal was to make visible these dream relationships, and to complement them with information about our waking relationship. Through this combination—and interactive functions that allow the viewer to explore—I hope to paint a picture of my conscious and subconscious relationships, and the overlaps or gulf between them. Ultimately it’s a self-portrait; more art than science.
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