Recreating Pictorial Dreams
It started out of an interest in trying to remember my dreams, as I usually forget them a few minutes after I wake up. The first photo I created was in 2024, which recreated an interesting dream where I was a plastic doll sitting on a bridge in my hometown, talking to an old friend from high school. In 2025, I revisited the project and partook in creating a dream journal over a two month period. By using a dream journal, I can jot down a quick sentence that sums up the most important aspect of my dream, which is usually all I need to refresh my memory of what the dream was about. I then used those sentences as a basis for each photograph in the series. I used a lot of different techniques to try and create a dream-like quality to each photograph, including digital compositing, rear projections and miniatures.
Each photo has its own distinct aesthetic to try and recreate the way the dream looked or felt. I also strictly used myself as the only live model in each photograph, except for one exception, where I recreated a dream where I told my parents I was a drug addict and they ignored me and brushed me away. The gaze that they gave at me was so striking that the only way to truly make the photograph was to ask them to recreate it. I changed my appearance in the photographs as much as I could in order to recreate a diffrent version of me, as in alot of my dreams I am a younger version of myself from a distinct time in my life, or even a surreal, fictional caricature of me. I never feel like a complete version of myself in my dreams, I either have a piece of me that is missing or changed, which causes me to feel disconnected to who I am.