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Dreamtime

Laurie McDonald

1988 00:06:30 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:33/4" U-matic video
Tags:
Mental Landscape, Youth/Childhood

Description

While asleep and dreaming, older children and adults alike tend to perceive dream events as external reality, but very young children do not understand "asleep" and "conscious" to be different domains. Perhaps they are not. Dreamtime is, quite literally, dream inspired video. A sleeping five-year- old girl (Alaine Ball) recounts dreams recorded over a three-month period in a voice-over sound track. She experiences what is referred to as a "lucid" dream, which is characterized by the dreamer knowing that he or she is dreaming while experiencing the dream:
           
I was trying to get back to life, but I just couldn't... and I was trying to make all the fake people in my dream fake, but it didn't work... (i.e., reminding herself in her dream that the people were a product of her imagination) ...trying to get back to life, but I just couldn't.

Dreaming and dreams seem to follow no prescribed delineation of time, place, or narrative. The fragmentation of time in dreams suggests structures inherent to film and video. In Dreamtime the video becomes the intermediary between the internal and material worlds, as the lively narrative of the dreams as described by Alaine contrasts with quiet images of her sleeping and suggests these dualities of consciousness and sleep. Recreating the images from Alaine's dreams is left to the imagination of the viewer and becomes ​an internalized, unique experience for the viewer, as dreaming is an internalized reality that can only be experienced by the dreamer. 

with Alaine Ball.

About Laurie McDonald

Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). 

As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées. 

Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.