The Mirror

1. REM: IN A WILD STATE OF PSYCHOSIS, WE’RE DREAMING, WE’RE FLYING, AND WE’RE FALLING–WHETHER WE REMEMBER IT OR NOT. WE’RE ALSO REGULATING OUR MOOD AND CONSOLIDATING OUR MEMORIES..
2. REM and non-REM dreams “dreaming without a dreamer”
3. Sweet dreams: experts say dreams are an important part of sleep. Here’s why
4. While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey
5. Why Do We Dream? To Ease Painful Memories, Study Hints
6. Sleeping on it – how REM sleep boosts creative problem-solving
7. Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest

After watching this video, here is what I have learnt about lucid dreaming:

• Lucid dreaming is where you can control what happens in your dreams.
• Dali, Einstein & Beethoven are amongst many historical figures who have used lucid dreaming to make their groundbreaking achievements.
• When you lucid dream, you are asleep but are still conscious.
• REM is when the body is in a state of ultimate relaxation and is paralysed to prevent the body acting out what is happening in the dream.
• On average, the body enters REM state up to 5 times per night.
• Writing down your dreams in as much detail as you can remember every night helps to make your body lucid dream.
• To encourage lucid dreaming you have to condition your mind to become more aware of itself, you should take reality checks (eg: counting your fingers) whilst you are awake and also backtrack to remember how you got to where you are now.
• Sometimes when you are dreaming, something will happen that will make you realise that you are dreaming, this can trigger lucid dreaming too.
• The most reliable technique to trigger lucid dreaming is to use memory techniques, so if you tell yourself every night before you go to sleep “tonight I will lucid dream” until you believe it, then you can initiate lucid dreaming yourself.

Sigmund Freud was very influential in the surrealist movement. Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) validated the great importance of dreaming and the revelations of our own thoughts and emotions that we can decipher from our dreams.

Freud states that dreams often fulfil our wishes, and even goes so far as to say that our nightmares also fulfil our wishes but that their true meanings are disguised.

Freud argues that a powerful psychical (or psychological) force acts as a censor while we dream. When our dreams try to express wishes that our waking selves would find distasteful or unpleasant, this psychical censorship distorts them in order to disguise their meaning.

He also argues that nightmares might fulfil a person’s masochistic inclinations, and that when we have nightmares we want to feel distressed and anxious. Freud insists that even the most harrowing dreams come from subconscious desires – we just don’t want to admit to ourselves that those desires exist.

According to Freud, there are two components that make up our dreams:

1. “The production of the dream-thoughts.”

2. “Their transformation into the content of the dream.”

Through his analysis of dreams, Freud concludes that dreams allow us to come to ‘radically new understandings of human nature and human thought’.

Whilst in Paris recently, I went to a Dalí exhibition – this led me to look into the idea of surrealism to do with this unit. Surrealism itself is defined as

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Surrealism artworks can be compared to dreams, the places that our minds go to & the connections that are subconsciously made. The imagination is a powerful tool, one that we slowly stop using as we get older, the Surrealism movement sought to ‘unlock the power of imagination’.

André Breton defined surrealism as:

psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express –  verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.”

 

In this quote, Breton is suggesting that artists ignore all rationality and reasoning by accessing their unconscious mind, embracing the idea of chance when creating their art.

In 2017, Amazon released a product called ‘Echo Look’, claiming that it ‘helps catalog your outfits and rates your look based on “machine learning algorithms with advice from fashion specialists.‘.

This means that now when you look into your mirror, you can be criticised by not only yourself, but also a whole team of fashion experts.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

In Snow White, the magic mirror is owned by the Evil Queen – she uses it to ask if she is the most beautiful in all of the land, because the magic mirror never lies. The mirror always replies, “My Queen, you are the fairest in the land.”. However, when Snow White turns 7 years old, the mirror begins to reply “My Queen, you are the fairest here so true. But Snow White is a thousand times more beautiful than you.”. The mirror’s response then causes the Evil Queen to have Snow White killed.

It is thought that this story was inspired by Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von und zu Erthal. After the death of her mother, her father remarried & Maria was seen as second to her step mother’s children. The Queen’s mirror, known as ‘The Talking Mirror’ can still be seen at Spessart Museum in the Lohr Castle, where Maria Sophia was born. The mirror is thought to have ‘spoken’ in aphorisms.

An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: aphorismos, denoting “delimitation”, “distinction”, and “definition”) is a concise, terse, laconic, and/or memorable expression of a general truth or principle.^[1] They are often handed down by tradition from generation to generation. The concept is distinct from those of an adage, brocard, chiasmus, epigram, maxim (legal or philosophical), principle, proverb, and saying; some of these concepts are species of aphorism.

Mirrors from Lohr were so elaborately worked that they were given the reputation of ‘always telling the truth’ and became a well loved gift amongst European crown and aristocratic courts.

As talked about in class, Victorian people were very morbid and would photograph the dead. In the above photo, the baby in the chair is actually a corpse, propped up as if he was asleep. This reminded me of this article I once saw, where a couple kept their dead baby in a refrigerated cot for 16 days:

• Giorgio Agamben – “Black, the colour of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the colour of freedom”.
• Vanta black – immersion, distortion.
• Roni Horn, Saying Water.
• The sublime.
• De Wain Valentine.
• John McCracken.
• Victorian Era – mourning, morbidity & portraits.
• Black panthers.
• Johnny Cash – Man in Black.
• Under the Skin.