Life is but a Dream: An Artistic Epxloration of Surrealism
“Estamos en mundo tan singular que el vivir sólo es soñar, y la experiencia me enseña que el hombre que vive sueña lo que es hasta despertar”
“We are in such a unique world that living is only dreaming, and experience teaches me that the man who lives dreams what he is until he wakes up”
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño
Have you ever believed something to be true, only to find out that it was only a dream? This is the question that inspired this project. Throughout my life, I have had countless experiences where I have dreams that feel so real that it is only when I discuss them with my family the next morning, or sometimes even years later, that I realize they were not real but rather the product of my unconscious mind. Given the supreme importance of dreams and their interpretation in surrealist practise, I decided to make these experiences - which are incredibly familiar to me - the main subject area of my project. Deeply influenced by Max Ernst’s collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté, I decided to use digital collage as my media of choice; given that this artistic process was central to the surrealists and was enacted as a means to interpret and discern the poetic nature of the unconscious mind. These collages depict an individual series of dreams that stand out due to how real they felt when I woke up - so real that I didn’t even question their validity, logic or reality. In my mind, they seemed like mere memories. Upon commenting about my project to my friends, they brought to my attention that they have also had such experiences, so I asked them to describe these dream realities to me and wrote them down in my notebook. Some of these collages also depict the dreams/realities of my friends. From an exhibition of a giant egg at the top of the World Trade Center to believing mermaids lived inside ambulances, these pieces serve as an artistic means to come to terms with the reality that these memories - which I believed so deeply to be true and shaped me as a person - were never real.
I also decided to include a quote from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Spanish-language play, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), which also inspired the title of my project. I read this work when I was fourteen years old, and even though the main subject of the play is about faith and free will, the main character’s (Segismundo) plight to reconcile his inability to discern reality from dream touched me deeply.
In retrospect, I absolutely adored undertaking this project. Being a person who is very aesthetically and artistically driven, it felt extremely freeing to be able not only to study heaps of surrealist art but to apply the knowledge in a “hands on” approach. I found it a very cathartic experience to have to translate the abstraction of my dreams into a piece of art. Through the blending of dreams and art, the process of this project suggests that life is itself an illusion. How can one argue that what I saw in my dreams was not real if it felt that way to me? If that which feels real is actually just a dream, then that which is real can also feel like a dream? It is a feeling impossible to translate unless one has experienced it, but it has taught me that reality is merely just about perception.
