Whispers in the night: A group portrait of haunted east Asians
Dreaming might be a unique human experience, and we remember certain dreams for a LONG time, and it is more likely that they are nightmares and recurring dreams.
Due to Kineviz’s article posted in 2021: DreamCatcher: Deep Learning and Graph Analytics for the Dreamscape(2.), people’s dreams share certain similarities. It is possible that people who belong to the same or similar cultural backgrounds are more likely to explore the collective identity and situation that affects them in the dream patterns.
As a member of the east Asian community, I started my dream exploration journey: almost a hundred nightmares and recurring dreams, demonstrated a bigger picture of East Asians’ nightmare stories: what is haunting us as a whole? What are we secretly suppressing in our heart? I listen to the whispers in the night, and observe my community from their dreams.
Guess which type of nightmare is the most popular?
Family.
Silent father, control freak mother, siblings, being asked to get married as soon as possible and have kids as soon as possible, being asked to go back to hometown, coming out in front of the whole family...
The dinner table thus becomes a metaphor: where all the conversations happen. Tears, confusion and all of the unspeakable secrets, are sealed in the food, become permanently silent.
Observe the tablewares and find out more stories.
It is almost a stereotype that east Asians are afraid of exams. In the little booklet of nightmares I collected, dreams about college entrance exams and school life occupied the second highest position of the dream categories. Certain triggering elements will make people immediately panic: exam papers, answer sheets, a countdown clock...all of these above can remind east Asians of their high school life or in general, high pressure students’ lives.
I as a result replicated an “exam.” with carefully designed artifacts related to exams and school life, participants are supposed to take the exam alone on a little desk. Interesting observations are made during this time, the test content is the listening part of an English exam I created, the in-between time of each audio clip is fairly short, and the ipad playing the audio is right in front of the participants. Even though the participants could stop the audio at anytime, none of them did so. They panickily continued the exam until they realized that they can not finish it. It is interesting to see how such major events in their lives slowly shaped people’s behaviors, and left them with a permanent mark.