[Who Am I] Dreamcatchers

 In my Humanities class, Who Am I, we have been talking about more philosophy! In this unit, we have gone into more recent philosophers, like Descartes, Freud, and Naruda. These philosopher has been much more interesting in how the human mind works. Descartes was focused on whether or not we exist, if god exists, and what all of that means. Naruda was asking and explaining what a good question is. And finally, Freud was talking about our internal desires, how we go through five stages of sexual development, which are, oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages. Freud also taught us about dreams, how they can be seen as wish-fulfillment and how the dreams can tell about the dreamer. We have taken this and made dream catchers to try and capture what Freud was saying. From Freud, we transitioned to the Surrealists as well. We learned about how they try to express their desires in different ways and how their internal emotions and logical thoughts are at war, they are called the ID and the Superego respectively. We also learned quite a bit about the Ojibwe Native American tribe so as to fully respect and understand the culture we were interpreting. This is how mine came out:

This dreamcatcher has a lot of meaning inside of it for me, right down to the strings. The strings have a few meanings, we’ll start with the color. The color of the string is black. I chose this color because, in the winter, black absorbs all of the heat so even though it is cold you are still warm. I want this dreamcatcher to not catch the negative dreams, I want them to pass through. If we pretend everything is positive, we are living lies. Dreams are often wish-fulfillment, or feeding our desires of the awake mind, but If I want that I can just think about a scenario in my head. I wish for the bad dreams to be able to get through, I just want the dreamcatcher to absorb the good dreams and then emanate them so they glow brighter than the bad ones. The only things I really want the dreamcatcher to block are Anxiety and the Superego. First of all anxiety, I often hide my anxiety from people but then when I dream I will sometimes relive the situation over and over unable to do anything about the awkwardness or whatever form the anxiety takes. The second of these is Superego. The Superego is the rational mind. You might be thinking, “wait, isn’t the rational mind a good thing?” Well, yes, it is, but sometimes when I am sleeping, and this is very similar, even connected to the anxiety, I will think and think and overthink about things until I have convinced myself that everything is backwards and the universe is upside down and then I will do something stupid. So, therefore, I would prefer that didn’t happen and I am able to sleep peacefully, without all of that unnecessary stress. 

The second meaning in this dreamcatcher is the five white pearl beads around the edge of the dreamcatcher. It might annoy some of you that it is not as perfectly symmetrical as it could be, but these are meant to symbolize the five stages of psychosexual development.  They are all white because I believe that all of these stages must have equal attention paid to them or a child may get stuck on one of the stages. I have definitely seen 15 year old kids who are never seen without a piece of gum, or other mastication device in their mouth. If I gave any of these beads any more importance than another, it would throw the whole balance out of wack and therefore they must all stay stable. 

                                         

The third meaning of this dreamcatcher is the little lettered beads in the center, and how it because less symmetrical and more random. This is because the more you get to know me the more you realize I am completely random. The lettered beads themselves represent people, my friends. If you are one of these people and you are reading this, no it’s not you don’t ask. This is how it finally connects to Surrealism. No one knows exactly who all is on this dreamcatcher. It shows my interpersonal relationships without directly telling the person who it is. And this is why I am really happy with this dreamcatcher, there are quite a few meanings, and only I know them all. It is a decently abstract piece of art that means a lot to me and only I will truly know all the ways it could be correctly interpreted.