Plan of Work
Editing: By the simple nature of this project, the inventory I am keeping will be continually growing over the course of the rest of the semester. As it stands now, however, I have a solid foundation of 9 dreams already recorded, which along with a detailing of all of their contents should allow for a good start.
Writing: While additional entries will be witten as they occur, I plan to have all of my current dreams edited and typed up, along with written summaries of each peice of content therin finished by the 1st.
Collecting: Again, an ongoing experience. I have fits and starts of nights with vivid dreams, so it's hard to predict how many I wil have before the semester finishes. Hopefully a substantial amount.
Shooting: This will mean taking representative photographs for each object or person in the contents portion of the site. I want to have a sort of scientific style with sterile lighting and white backdrops for all of the photographs. I also want to do simple diagrammatic illustrations for each dream. They should be representative, but iconic in their minimalism. I plan to start this process by the 30th and finish by the 8th of April.
Wireframe: Once I have the main content starting to pull together, figuring out the structure should begin to be much easier. I plan to start on the wireframe today, the 25th, and finish by the 15th of April.
Design: Fits and starts are expected, but I don't want t plan them. I want to have the design finished by he 22nd of April at the latest.
Wireframe x Design: Working out the coding kinks will probably start around the 5th of May and take all the way out into the 27th as the design and wireframe mesh up and make sense.
The 11th hour slush fund: Picking up as I finish the design, I plan to alot a little extra time to play catch-up and muddle through code, all the way to the 29th of April.
Proposition
I want to make an extensive archive of the dreams I can remember while waking up. I have very vivid dreams on a regular basis, so there is a ready and continuous supply of dreams for the archive (as long as I make an effort of writing them down). The benefit for the site would arrive mostly from it's value as an entertaining curiosity as well as an in depth exposure of the inner dream life of a single person.
I intend to dissect and categorize the dreams by their contents (repeat appearances of particular people, situations) qualities (a sliding scale for surreality or grandiosity) and how well I remembered them while I wrote them down. Hopefully this peicing apart will allow me to draw patterns and relationships among the dreams, establishing a greater structure to the nature of my psyche, and hopefully further establishing the site as a useful resource of anecdotal information on the subject.
As the dreams connect with the real world, I intend to also catalog these connections. I will provide a brief, if vague, description of the day leading up to the dream. I will try and take clean, scientific photography of all the repeating physical elements of the dreams. As for people, perhaps a nice photograph of a framed portrait will serve a similar purpose. The artifacts of my dreams will then feature on their own pages within the site, relating them to frequency of appearance, nature of the dreams in which they appeared, and linking them to outside research on Jungian archetypes, dream psychology, and just general information on the object/person.
All of this information collected about the dreams and my recollections of them will hopefully allow me to create some sort of mapping out of the patterns in a visual space. I would love to find a way to do the mapping dynamically (through flash or something) but that might be beyond the keen of this course. The value of the site will come mostly from this holistic interpretation and the picture it paints, rather than in the individual nodes of interest.
Quanitfying the Dream
The primary feature of each dream entry will be the written record of the dream itself. These will be written soon after waking up, and will be only slightly edited in their transition to the archive.
Every dream will be tagged with basic information concerning:
- the dream's title (given upon waking)
- the date
- the time of recording
- my location after waking
Each dream will feature four variables on a sort of sliding scale of 0 to 10:
- The Nightmare Quotient: A measure of how troubling the dream was for me personally, with 10 being psychological trauma and 0 being blissful contentment.
- The Memory Variable: How well I remember the dream by the time I've written it down. Here, each digit is roughly equal to 10%, so a dream with a Memory Index of 5 would be only half remembered.
- The Surreality Quanta: How bizarre the dream was when compared to the waking world. 0 represents real as real gets, 10 represents some delirious and barely comprehensible abstraction.
- The Grandiosity Index: How important I am within the dream world. A 0 would signify the fact that I'm not in the dream at all (it has happened before) while a 10 would recognize me as king of all creation.
The contents of the dreams themselves will be listed out and will feature their own distinct entries. As they appear listed in the dream entry, they will be color coded as to their relationship with the dream variables, and will fall into several distinct categories:
- Famous people
- Family members
- The non-famous and non-family
- The redacted (Due to some compromising role within the dream, they will follow a Ms. A, Mr. B sort of nomenclature.)
- Animals
- Objects
- General locations (e.g. An office)
- Specific locations (e.g. Pullen Park)
- Patterns (Is this dream familiar?)
- Unclassified things of note
Each dream content will have it's own entry with a short description, some sort of representational photograph, links to outside articles discussing the role of such elements in dreams, and an index of all the dreams that the element has appeared in, along with the dates. These dreams will be color coded to represent the role of the element as it effected the variables of that dream.
In addition to individual entires, there will either be a dynamic or regularly updated chart of various trends within the dreams. If apples keep popping up in dreams during March, they will get a chart to show this trend. If there's a steep incline in redacted figures as the year wears on, a chart will be made to illustrate that. These charts will be displayed on the main page of the site.