Interpreting dreams has been a consuming passion for humans since long. Dreams are a gateway to the unconscious mind, perhaps that is why many artists record their dreams. But for Karan Vanjari, a design student, it all started with a college assignment. He photographed his crumpled and creased bedsheets in the mornings, and recreated his dreams on them.
The project is called Arousals. Arousal typically represents a shift from deep sleep, which is commonly known as REM sleep, to light sleep, known as NREM sleep, or from sleep to wakefulness. The creased bedsheets indicate movement in sleep, possibly caused by arousals. Dreams during this transition and during the light sleep are often retained in our mind for a while. And hence, a creased morning bed, after a night-long sleep becomes a suitable canvas for dreams.
Karan is a fourth year design student of MIT Institute of Design. He is inspired by 3D art and aspires to be a motion designer. “I recreated my “arousals” with the help of these photos. I made bump, displacement, normal and diffuse maps and went ahead and made a scene in Cinema 4D,” he says. There are no traces of the creased bed in the final artwork, but it definitely has the fantastical quality of our most vivid dreams.
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