Lydia Nakashima Degarrod is an American artist and anthropologist. For twenty-three years she has been creating works at the intersection of ethnography and art and presented a number of her latest works in a scientific article. Among them is a map of lucid dream (LD) stories.
The artist conducted her research in San Francisco where fourteen people residing within a ten-block radius told her about eighteen lucid dreams. Lydia then strolled around listening to audio recordings of the dreamers’ stories. “I found a bench nearby where I sat for a while,” she shared her process of creating the painting. “I closed my eyes facing the sun, and I recalled the few times that I experienced lucid dreams. I re-created the feelings of wonder and amazement that I felt as I became aware that I was dreaming.”
Later, in the studio, she drew a grid of the streets she had walked along. She tried to show the emotions experienced in these places: the sun reflecting off dandelions, the feeling of its warmth on her closed eyelids, and the memories of her own lucid dreams.
Degarrod herself considers this melding of art and anthropology to be the embodiment of emotional and intellectual knowledge. For her, it is a search for inner images in which memories and reflections are activated by the act of artistic creativity.
What would your lucid dream map look like?
The article was published in December 2021 in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
