UNRAVEL
After witnessing each other’s responses to our initial ‘extensions’, we ‘unravelled’ these responses through a workshop activity. I was interested in reconfiguring our words into sentences which reflected raw, subconscious thought, as opposed to constructed, filtered sentences.
In psychiatrist, Carl Jung’s book, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’, he states that “the unconscious is not just a mirror reflection, but an independent, productive activity” (Jung, 1993: 196) and is not “merely reactive to the conscious mind” (Jung, 1993: 196).
In psychologist, Robert Waggoner’s book, ‘Lucid Dreaming: A Gateway to the Inner Self’, he states that “because we assume we create the dream, we never bother to ask the dream itself. To get beyond ourselves, we have to stop focusing on our doings and manipulations and allow the unconscious an opportunity to respond” (Waggoner, 2008: 54).
Therefore, rather than writing initially straight from the conscious mind, Kayleigh and I wrote what we interpreted when watching ourselves playing with objects. We assigned the objects with different names/labels, such as calling a bottle of body spray “exhaustion” and an ornament “the night”. Because of this, when writing down what we saw the objects doing during our play, our writing became more allegorical than literal. Instead of seeing myself spraying body spray on an ornament, I saw “exhaustion” spraying “the night”. Furthermore, the initial thought process whilst engaged in the play was focused on practicality and immediate thoughts about purpose. So, in the moment, we were less aware of emotions subconsciously affecting the play. Later, we allowed our conscious minds to interpret our subconscious thought whilst watching the recordings of ourselves playing from an objective viewpoint.
Just as Waggoner “asks his dreams” rather than “assuming he creates his dreams” – we asked our pre-existing thoughts rather than allowing ourselves to create new thoughts, i.e. what are we thinking rather than what do we think we are thinking.
When reading Kayleigh’s description of our playing, it was interesting to see her interpretation of a hair bobble (which she re-named “inside”) being placed around a bottle of body spray (which she re-named “hidden”). The sentence she had conjured was as follows: “The inside engulfs me, I am hidden. Hidden inside”. This sentence very much reflects our intentions for this project – to find what is hidden on the inside of our shells. Therefore, to see Kayleigh’s subconscious description of herself (“I”) being “engulf[ed]” was very exciting and instigates some ‘self-dissecting’ as the next stage of this project.
Here is the recording of mine and Kayleigh’s play, with the sentences of subconscious thought we both generated…
