In the Sheets- New Project!

In the Sheets is a project inspired by my personal dream diary.  I have suffered from insomnia for a number of years, when I do finally sleep, I have very strange dreams. Because these dreams were so strange, a friend who is also a poet suggested I write them down. From this, I decided to base my project on these dreams. The dreams range from fun, to strange to interesting to very dark. I was also heavily inspired by Sam Winston’s ‘Solace’ piece.

The text is hand-cut and scanned in to give the effect of depth and to allow them to flow in a wave form, to present the brain waves we have when we sleep. The material is very thin tracing paper, which allows the text to be seen through on either side to represent the lucid dreams.

I decided to create 5 short stories, as there are 5 stages of sleep. The typeface has 5 different weights, all of which change depending on the sleep stage. Each story explains the stage of sleep and also picks out particular words. These words are given a dictionary definition. The words are explored to see what it means to dream about ‘swimming’ for example. 

At the end of the story is a separate page of my scanned personal dream diary to add an element of reality to these unusual dreams.

Dreams

I'm an insomniac and when I do eventually get to sleep I tend to have very trippy dreams and I come in and out of sleep and sometimes get reality mixed up with my dreams.

I keep a diary of the dreams I have because some of them became too weird I wanted to write them down to look back on and remember. It will be so nice in years to come to look back on my dreams that I otherwise would have forgotten. Some are very dark and almost worrying whereas others are extremely bizarre and funny.

I tend to write in my diary when I've just woken up (of which I'm still in a very surreal state at times)

Here's an entry from 13th September 2011

'There was this guy and he got this thing mixed up with a monkey.'  It obviously must have made sense to me at the time...

And another from 22nd October 2011...

'My mum had bought a million kinder eggs boxes and I was so happy! There were loads of toys and queen and kings and a pool table in the other room also filed with loads of kinder eggs toys. It was like a little collection thing.'

These were very short entries but there are longer dreams I will share with you at some point.