Kait O'Brien

Memory Vellum 1

I Travel Back to Omaha Via the Windy City

At night I dream of worlds that could be and then I wake up here. New research suggests that the muscular twitching in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is indicative of a neuromuscular learning process—a bottom up mechanism for behavior—as opposed to previous understandings of the phenomenon being a recreation of cognitively recognized sleep behavior. Our bodies are built from the bottom up. We learn our bodies through the act of our motor neurons recognizing each other, synthesizing the language of movement in small motions, through our dreams.

What do you dream about? What worlds do you dream about? The American empire fails because it has forgotten how to dream. The American empire exists because it has eradicated dreaming. What would the world look like if we listened to our dreams?

Sometimes, I go places because I’ve dreamed them. I dreamed of the Great Basin Desert when I was young and I return there at night to smell the sagebrush sea.

It is well documented that exposure to blue light emitted from screens disrupts the delicate system that coordinates circadian rhythm. The optic nerve thinks the day is still going, it tells the pons to keep us awake. The medullary cortex becomes confused, and insomnia rises in the population.

We discovered the neurobiological mechanism underpinning REM sleep paralysis—as a scientific community—because of an inhumane study that removed the pons (a structure at the base of the brain) from cats. In 1965, Michel Jouvet discovered through the removal of the pons that mammals can survive only 8 months with dream sleep.

What happens to a society when we forget to dream? What happens to us when we lose our connection with the self? What happens when we lose our dreams to electric sleep?

Kait O'Brien says:

I am primarily a visual artist with integrative practices across music and writing disciplines. Through installation based work that leans on hand drawn animation, experimental photography, poetry, encaustic and music composition, I seek to explore the way in which our subconscious touches the landscapes we inhabit. As an active and vivid dreamer, I illustrate dreamscapes through these installation practices. My dreams “take place” in very real—although distorted—locations, often in the American mid/west.