OK, so what’s with the name of my project - “Dopamine Dreams”?
I get migraines. A lot. 2-3 times per week. They come on in my sleep. I know I’m having an attack when I get woken up at 2am with what feels like a knife being push into the side of my head. It’s not just a headache. It is a nerve storm in my brain.
In the lead up to an attack, I’m usually asleep, but in this weird half-sleep, half-dreaming mode where I can feel the pain, but not enough to get out of bed yet. At this time, the levels of dopamine in my brain is fluctuating, causing all manner of effects. One of these are weird dreams. When I’m in this state, my dreams have become filled with geometric patterns, colours and movement.
Apparently I'm not alone, with other migraineurs reporting similar experiences:
The term “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” was coined to account for certain hallucinations peculiar to migraine,1, 2 and the name comes, of course, from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871). Moreover, since Carroll suffered from migraine, Lippman suggested that he had used his own migraine experiences as a source of inspiration for his two books, so it was said that “Alice trod the path of a wonderland well known to her creator”
"Lewis Carroll's migraine experiences", The Lancet, 17 April 1999 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)74368-3/fulltext
So I usually get up, take a migraine abortive medication and then go back to bed. It usually takes about 2-3 hours for the meds to work. While I’m waiting for the pain to subside, I’m awake but my are eyes closed and I try to create pictures in my head. The dopamine and the drugs are doing their thing.
Even though it can be incredibly debilitating, it can be quite productive from a creative point of view. When I was working on my Yashinoki project, I was struggling to figure out how to arrange my lovely organic forms. I had tried lots of approaches but none were really doing it for me. Then a few days later, in the midst of a migraine dopamine dream, it came to me. I could see my work. I could visualise and experiment with the arrangements. I could change how I wanted them to look.
A day later, when I could function, I coded the changes and released the project.
Dopamine Dreams
In this new work, I wanted to create something that evoked this migraine/dopamine dream-like state and transport the viewer into a landscape filled with colour and forms.
The work is a conversation between two different but symbiotic approaches. One is tight, ordered and calm. The other is loose, loopy and excited. Between them they compete to fill the space, to create a balance between two different states of being.
In some ways, Dopamine Dreams is a collaboration between me and my migraine. It’s a visualisation of my dreams.
I hope you enjoy them.
AE