November 17th- Dreaming About Finals

 

In today's class we watched a PBS documentary called What Are Dreams?: Inside The Sleeping Brain.  The documentary mostly dealt with scientific studies about dreams and their purpose.  In one study they found that REM sleep (dream-state sleep) boosted creativity, but another study found that too much REM sleep led to a tendency for depression.  I found this interesting and tied this back to the idea in one of the TED Talks we watched previously in this class where the author of Eat Pray Love talked about the reputation of artists and creative minds being depressed and self-destructive.  Maybe creativity and a tendency towards depression actually have a scientific link? Hmmm...

Of course Jimmy found a way to cleverly relate this to our class.  Since REM states of sleep boost creativity and can stimulate ideas he assigned us all to think about our final project before we go to sleep and then hopefully dream about it and spark some ideas for how to go about completing it.

Our final for this class is to create a video that somehow shows our particular creative process and what graphic design means to us and why we are in the field of design.  It's basically a self analysis.  Coming up with a plan on how to effectively display this clearly and creatively in a video will be challenging.  I hope that whole dreaming up ideas thing works!  I'm more of a nap person, so getting REM sleep will prove to be a challenge in itself for me.  Oh, and the final will be posted onto this blog for all to see as well!