1. Pillowcase of dreams

I think the main influence for this piece came I as was falling asleep… as I lay there thinking about the hundreds and thousands of things that were on my list to do, I realised that the majority of these things were not ones that I, myself, had chosen to do. They were in fact, a list of tasks that had been dictated to me by others, be that by my parents, the university, society even… I thought it unlikely that I would ever have spontaneously decided to embark on any of these individual tasks.

Which got me thinking, how often do we really, as humans, listen to exactly what our hearts are hankering after? How often do we pay full attention to to our deepest, maybe even our darkest desires? How often do we actually tread the paths that we lust after in our dreams?

We pay so little attention to these innermost working of our minds, we pay them so little heed that they may as well just be litter in the street, gum on the bottom of a shoe, dust on a windowsill, or dirty linen in a heap on the bathroom floor.

We pay so little attention to these innermost workings of our minds when we should be worshipping them, paying them our respects, treating them as we would our closest friends, holding them in the highest regard, listening to them when they cry out for attention

If your dreams were the equivalent to your heartbeat, then you’d be worried if they went missing, if they were suddenly absent one day.

Wouldn’t you?

A lack of dreaming is an issue

A lack of dreaming is a lack of respect for yourself

A lack of dreaming is a lack of a desire to live

If you no longer dream, then you no longer have a reason for your heart to continue beating.

I wanted to work two main themes into my projects; these being dreaming and your heartbeat being such an important, essential thing. I then had the idea to look into REM sleep; the stage in your sleep cycle known as Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This is the last stage in the (roughly 90 minute) 5 stage sleep cycle that occurs each night and, during this period, your brainwaves speed up and this is when the majority of dreaming happens. Another thing that happens in this stage of the sleep cycle is that one’s heart rate increases and breathing becomes rapid and shallow.

I decided that a seamless way to mesh all of these ideas together would be to embroider someones heart rate whilst they were in REM sleep (aka dreaming) onto a pillowcase, therefore also alluding to the intimacy of dreams. I used red stitch to draw parallels with how ones heart rate would appear on a heart monitor whilst in a hospital, likely in a serious medical condition.

I hung the finished piece up on a washing line as a commentary on how little disregard we tend to show to our innermost dreams/ambitions: they may as well just be laundry for all we seem to care about them.