WORLD BUILDING
“What if what you dreamed at night became real in the morning for twenty-four hours in the morning?”
In this world, the forms and figures of our dreams become real for a twenty-four hour period. Reflecting the way in which creation is held in the Unconsciousness, these creations of our sleeping minds have a mediated tangibility but are inaccessible in that they are without physical form- something like a hologram imbibed with the parts of our personalities we have projected onto them. It is a world in which the tenuousness of a collective reality is at the forefront of everyday life, and fact and fiction are treated as two sides of the same coin.
The specificity of the characters in our dreams being realized but not the environments or emotional tenors of the dreams highlights the absurdity of one aspect of our mental creations as part of our daily situations.
Our project utilizes advertisement as a medium in which to convey the relationship between art and politics through the conventions of lived experience. How does this complication effect the social lives of people in the world? How does it affect individuals physically/mentally/emotionally? What types of services and products would people need in a world where dreams and reality were interchangeable? What are ways in which the extraordinary becomes mundane, everyday, ordinary, inconvenient? In what ways might this enhance the human experience? These are some of the questions we asked in building our world. The result are three advertisements that offer a glimpse into a world in which the unconscious and conscious works mix on a daily basis. The services we chose to represent are interested in three areas: the direct interaction with the projections that originate in sleep while they exist, the consequences of the projections after they have gone, and the preventative measures to temper the situation before these dreams are realized.
In the world in which we live, people’s relationships with their dreams vary greatly as a result of their vividity, recollection, and frequency. In the world we created, people are forced to interact with not only their own daily dreams, but other people’s as well. If you dream about a person, you are creating them as a function of your own brain and not as an accurate depiction of themselves, so as they are projected onto the world the person is then aware of your subconscious perceptions of them.
We wanted the ads to be accessible and commonplace, and thus created our designs akin to ones seen in subway stations or Reader’s Digest pages. Any of these could be found in either form and are thus effective means of advertisement in this world. The “Dream Catchers” ad was largely inspired by the Ghost Busters movies because their job is to go into dreams and tame the unconscious projections as they occur, similar to how the Ghost Busters go around “capturing” ghosts as they interfere with people’s daily lives. “Remeditol” was a creation inspired by common name-brand prescription ads as well as the common names for those drugs, which often have something to do with the intended function of the drug. In Remeditol’s case, the prefix “REM-” is dual purpose: REM for the dreaming stage of sleep, and re- to go with the suffix of -meditol. “-medit-” refers to meditation and cognition, so “Remedit-” is intended to reference the ability the drug has help people take control of their lives, to rethink their reality and ultimately make their own conscious decisions. As for the “Romantics Anonymous” ad, what world could possibly be complete without some sort of assisted dating service? At the same time, the service takes advantage of the more pleasant dreams people can have and seeks to help those dreams become lasting realities rather than fleeting days of holographic like projections. The name is perfect because it acknowledges the anonymity of a dreamt character while still representing hope for those with the dreams.
As we designed these ads and services, we did indeed experience the “purposeful reflection and consideration” Julian Bleeker discusses in her essay on Design Fiction. Not only did we reflect on our own experiences with dreaming, advertisements, and pop culture, but we considered how these would become relevant in the world we imagined. Such a process was engaging for us and we felt we could imagine some of the experiences people in this world might go through. At that level of thought, our work was more than simple creativity-- it was an attempt to understand the fiction populace of the sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying world where dreams become reality for 24 hours.
