Dream Catcher

 

During my initial visual research into the topic ‘dreams’,  of dream catchers, they caught my interest due to the spiritual meaning behind the objects, which made me question how exactly they would capture dreams and help with nightmares.

Starting off the research into dream catchers, I simply searched dream catchers into Youtube to see if anything ground breaking or immediately interesting would come up. From the search I found this short film below, though I didn’t find the film particularly interesting or innovative, because many movies in the past have visualised nightmares or had characters eaten by creatures. I did find the part where the girl tries to use the dream catcher as a weapon interesting as I felt this could be a creative item within a game and brought up ideas of dream catcher characters much like the Ghost Busters.

 

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Refer to Research Folder

 

Wanting to learn more about the origin and purpose behind the dream catchers I researched more into the background of them. Reading through two websites I managed to learn:

• Dream catchers originate from Native Americans – Anishinaabe
• They believe that there are dreams in the air, both good and bad and the dream catcher sorts through them to give you good dreams
• Bad dreams are caught in the web and good dreams fall through the hole in the middle and down the feathers into the sleeper.
• Catchers originate form an old native American legend about an elder and a spider.

Source Source

 

Points of Interest

From the research the main points of interest included the concept of dreams being around us and being able to capture them, because it’s the opposite of what western society would traditionally believe, with dreams being crafted within a person’s mind. Therefore it makes me wonder if there’s ways people could alter the dreams around them, or if dreams follow people. I think there could be a narrative concept out of this information which could help strike up a game idea.

Also I’m interested in the origins of the dream catchers and the original creators, learning that they come from the Native Americans (Anishinaabe) tribes. I’m intrigued by their culture, because the dream catcher appears to be very spiritual but also organic and natural, suggesting the community must have some deep connection with Earth. Being a person interested within nature myself and believing nature can the well beings of humans, I want to learn how they connect with it and what defines their connection.

Plan

• When looking over the research I identified the main areas of interest to be both the concept of catching dreams and the Native American people. With time being tight to finish researching, with our presentation of research points in a couple of days, I will plan to research into the Native American communities, as I feel information for this subject matter will be easier to find than for the other. Therefore I believe this will allow me to gain information more quickly and so expand my research further than would be possible with the other topic. So overall I plan to research into the Native American culture, finding out about what they believe in, what they looked like, what their visual identify was like and so on. I plan to do this by gaining imagery of the people and their garments and objects, as well as researching in books and on blogs.