I find myself contemplating on why I chose Lucid Dreaming. I never have dreams that I remember, maybe one dream in a whole two weeks. I often thought that there was something wrong and maybe I had done something to stop my mind from dreaming. I even had the silly belief that it was because of a dream catcher that I once broke. There was a dream catcher that had hung in the hallway but I only like the middle part of it, the part with the intriguing circle that had a spider web of strings crossing through the middle of it. There were bohemian beads and feathers hanging off it and it was this part that I loved. One day my attraction to it just about burst and cut the middle bit off and hung it over my bed where to this day it still hangs. I often think that I have angered someone by doing this and in return my dreams have been stolen from me. While this is sort of meaningless I think this is the reason that Lucid Dreaming was so attracting for me. It was something that has been denied to me and something that I have given up thinking about. When I opened my mind to the possibilities that I could achieve with this focus, I immediately started to have ideas of what I could do to communicate the focus.
To me Lucid Dreaming communicates the sense of subconscious and conscious thoughts that are continuously float around in the back of our minds but only surfaces when we surrender ourselves to our spiritual dream side. Such thoughts of freedom and belonging are constantly in the back of my mind and I feel that it often surfaces as my personal aesthetic.
The first photographs that I took for this focus was of birds. It was a subconscious act and I didn't realise that I was focusing on birds until I looked back through the photos. However I have not incorporated these bird images into any of my pieces of artwork for reasons that I am not sure of at the moment. I just havn't found the right place for them to go I think. While I was looking through the photos of birds however I found that alot of them had the bright afternoon sun in them. While I continued to look through the photos I felt the sense of freedom in each of them. Using this feeling I then progressed to take a number of photos of the sun and with it the beautiful crops that surround my house. The effect that the afternoon sun had on the crop plants created this beautiful dreaming sense as the outline of the plants was golden and light was shining. These became my backgrounds in my photos.

Another set of experimental photos that I took were at night however there was too much surrounding light and the photos didn't have the dark dream-like effect that I wanted. At first I wanted to work with the idea of torturing and bad dreams but then the aesthetic of freedom seemed to arise back in and I started to create the idea of a bird by using a fabric sheet around me to create wings almost. Again it wasn't planned and just happened to turn out that way.

In the end I decided that the idea of freedom would most likely emerge throughout whatever I did and so I started to experiment with photos to see what sort of dream I could create. The end result was the idea of myself in consciousness and the my birdlike self entering from the darkness and unknown part of my dream into the lucid dream. It is then once I have enetered the dream that I am free. I wanted to communicate the sense that the darkness in my works is the place that is left behind once our minds enter into the lucid dream. The darkness reflects both our consciousness and our previous state of mind (dream) that was occurring before that we are not aware of. It is then once we have entered into the lucid dream that our minds are free and can create what we fell most and want.