Hey, here are some images that I made for the group presentation.  I did all of them in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and I did all of the animation in Adobe Flash CS3 (scripting in AS3).

Here is an image of the map of OZ that I made:

OZ: by Kyle Kienitz

This is a fairly large image (1200×1200) but if you would like the source file (psd) or a larger jpeg or something just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to get that to you.  I consider all of this work as open source, so I have no problem sharing my source files.  Please enjoy!

Except for the actual pictures, most all of the graphics were all made in photoshop.  I do have to thank cgtextures.com for some great material such as the pages:

This is Step 1.

From here I made a book to put the pages in, added many more pages and of course threw in some shading.

Step 2

From here I added some more shading, put the map on there, made a table complete with #2 Ticconderoga pencil, and we get our final result.

Final Image

Again, please enjoy these images and use them if you can.

Concerning our group:  I’m happy how my part went, though quite rushed at the end I got everything done.  I think that we did a good job in provided extra information that one normally wouldn’t have come across while reading or watching The Wizard of Oz.  We did quite a bit of research and found a ton of very interesting material.  It was difficult to get it all together in a presentable form though.  I think that we could have improved considerably on the connections and the material itself.  In places it seemed to me that we were just a bit too random.  Though there is a place for that, it is nice to have some connections for ease in following the ideas of the presentation.

The second group that went was very entertaining.  They did a great displacement of Dorothy into a strip comedy.  I really enjoyed it and thought they did a wonderful job.  It was very rich with allusion and connections.

I really enjoy doing animation and graphic design.  I hope to make a career out of it someday.  Hopefully soon.  As for the project being up on a website…  I can put it on the internet available for download, however there are many things that I would have done differently if i was planning on putting this on the internet.  The file size will be a bit large, so it will take a bit of time to load probably.

When I get it up I’ll post the link.

Kyle Kienitz

Dr. Sexson

December 2008

Dreaming of the Self

“Life, what is it but a dream?” concludes Through the Looking Glass. The dream-like story of Alice in Wonderland is full of obscure occurrences one generally encounters while sleeping. Alice’s adventure begins with seeing a talking white rabbit with a waistcoat and continues with nonsensical miscellany until she awakes. Just as Alice fell into the rabbit hole and began entered a dream world, so too can lucid dreamers intentionally put themselves into a conscious wake-like sleep. Understanding the role of the “self” is extremely important not only for Alice, but in much the same way for lucid dreamers.

A lucid dream can be defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “A dream in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and is sometimes able to control or influence the course of the dream.” There are many techniques used to initiate a lucid dream, though it takes considerable practice and time to master certain methods. The payoff is the ability to control one’s own dreams and create custom dream adventures, which sounds a lot like writing a story or spinning a tale. Surely Lewis Carroll would have something to say about this as “Alice” often seems to be the quintessential dream-like fantasy.

As Alice’s adventures begin, she is not conscious that she is dreaming. This is assuming, of course, that Alice is in fact dreaming her adventures. This assumption is based off of her exit from the dream rather than from her entrance. “[She] tried to beat them [the cards] off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister (Carroll 76).” She seems to drift unknowingly into a dream as the quick white rabbit checks the time and runs past.

The words of Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix” come quickly to mind. As Neo begins his journey through the rabbit hole actually into “real” life he is asked, “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference, between the dream world…and the real world….?” Just as Neo is completely unaware of being in a dream through most of his life, Alice also seems unaware of the transition between a dream world and a non-dream world.

What is to say that Alice is not simply imagining all of these happenings? If this was the case, Alice would be seen as a much more clever and creative character. However, if she is understood as dreaming, credit is not given to her imagination but to the seemingly collective imagination which controls dreams, or rather, the author who is influenced by such imagination. Dreams tend to give credence to the idea of collective unconscious because most people feel as if they would never even think of such things as they dream about at night. Whether people are not given enough credit in the imagination area or something greater flows through the subconscious in all dreamers, can be debated and yet, dreams continue – dreamers do not stop.

In her article, “The Poetics and Spirituality of Dreaming: A Native American Enactive Theory,” Barbara Tedlock says, “In both my [lucid] dreams I experienced a form of ‘doubling,’ or conscious awareness of both being in a dream state and being sound asleep.” She goes on to explain that this consciousness contains the ideas of self-awareness and self-reflectiveness. In the context of a lucid dream this is necessary. To realize that one is in a dream, he must first understand and grasp a sense of self. Once a sense of self is obtained, a reference point for comparison is given. The questions of “Who am I?”, “Where am I?” or “What am I?” can be asked once a reference point is placed which occurs at the moment of self-awareness.

These questions are quite familiar to Alice when talking to the Caterpillar. Alice, at this point, is already aware of herself. When asked who she was by the Caterpillar, Alice replies that she hardly knows, with everything that has been happening to her. She begins asking questions of identity of herself, which can only mean that she has already established a reference point, a mark of self-awareness. Interestingly Tedlock also describes this as “self-reflectiveness.” Though these terms (self-awareness and self-reflectiveness) are certainly different, the process seems quite natural to begin with an awareness of self and then becoming inquisitive of that self.

Lucid dreaming must be preceded by dream recall. The only reason for this is because the dreamer would not know that he was lucid if he was not able to remember. The next obstacle with lucid dreaming is not awaking when self-realization occurs. For lucid dreamers this can be a very difficult task and often frustrating as much time is usually required to understand and recognize the signs of a dream only to wake up when that occurs. It is quite interesting that dreamers are awoken when confronted with a reference point of self. In the same way, as if Alice forgot that realization, when she is given a point of reference in the final court scene of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she sees that she is quite large and all of the others are quite small and, as Alice says, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Alice is awoken from Wonderland when a reference point is made, which is a realization of self.

For the lucid dreamer this process is more exact. Alice seems to have plenty of self-awareness throughout the story and yet only awakens after a certainly prominent moment of self-awareness. Therefore, dreaming requires a certain lack of self-awareness. Once the dreamer becomes aware, he either awakes or can change the dream’s course. Alice also seems to be somewhat unaware. She certainly does not awake, and certainly cannot control Wonderland – Wonderland controls her. It could then be argued that the collective unconscious is present in the dream world, but at the point of lucidity, or self-awareness, that unconscious is soiled by the conscious self. The story of Alice, if not controlled by her conscious self would then be a representation of that collective unconscious which reigns over dream logic.

Alice deals considerably with the idea of “self” and it seems to affect the adventures that she has. Lucid dreamers also rely on “self” to instantiate lucidity while dreaming. The self plays a very important role in the story of Alice and in the dreamer. Self-consciousness is necessary for lucidity in the dream world and yet Alice never seems to make it to complete self-consciousness, because if she did then she would be able to control Wonderland. Just as a dreamer allows subconscious dream-logic to reign, so to is Alice immersed in the whims of that same logic. A lucid dreamer must first become self-aware, and so too do our beloved children’s story characters.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Ann Arbor: Borders Classics, 2006.

Tedlock, Barbara. “The Poetics and Spirituality of Dreaming: A Native American Enactive Theory.” Dreaming, Vol. 14(2-3), June-September 2004, pp. 183-189.

The Matrix. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Perfs. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne. 1999. DVD. Warner Bros., 2001.

from: afafa.org

I was trying to think of the Matrix in terms of the collective unconscious.  If you say that the Matrix itself represents a collective unconscious than it seems that it has been caged.  A forced conformity.  However, one of the agents says something to Morpheus that is interesting.  As he explains how the Matrix got started, he says that the first versions of the Matrix were designed so that everyone would be happy – there would be no pain.  The problem was that people kept waking up – their minds didn’t like a world without pain.  So I was wondering what that says about the human condition.  If the collective unconscious needs, for some reason, pain and experience.  This sounds an awful lot like childhood vs. adulthood.

Does the collective unconscious force us into experience?
curiouser and curiouser.

Graphically - I like this movie, except for this shot.

I like thinking of the mail kind of like a portal.  A package exists in a place before it is shipped, and then it is sent whirling through space and time until is shows up again in an entirely different location.

I know that this is a bit of a stretch, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the mail since new guitar is being sent via UPS.  It is a 2008 Fender American Stratocaster featuring the Sienna Sunburst.  Wow, what a hot guitar.  I can’t wait to play it!  The timing is a bit hard because I should be doing lots of homework.  hmm… homework or guitar… hmm… bad or good?  lame or awesome?  what to choose, what to choose.

Anyway, in a wormhole somewhere it looks like this:

MY GUITAR

NUMBER 1: With a tablespoon measure – begin digging behind the house until enough ore has been uncovered.  Melt it down into malleable metal.  Find tree branch and cut it down.  Whittle branch and shape metal to make shovel.  Ok, now start digging again until enough ore is uncovered to melt it down and make a road bike – Also, while digging be thinking of how to make rubber for tires.  Next forge gears, pedals, spokes, wheels, chain, cables, derailers, brakes, etc.  Ok, then test ride it up to Hyalite Reservoir and back.  Stop by Practice Rock on the way and flash Cardiac Arete.

NUMBER 2: uhmm… clean my room.  (if you saw it, you would know)

NUMBER 3: build a mousetrap which, upon stepping on a pedestal a mechanism launches the mouse into space, toward the general vicinity of the moon in hopes they will band together and start a mouse world on the lunar surface.

NUMBER 4: Grow a bonsai tree and name it Janine.

BONSAI

NUMBER 5: Write a scifi series in assorted languages starting in Hebrew and ending in Cunniform.

NUMBER 6: Stop Planet X from hitting the earth in 2012.

especially in connection with the idea of the Collective Unconscious.  This can be seen throughout The Golden Compass.  It is interesting how Pullman depicts the Church in the story as trying to work against the work of studying Dust.  The reader is left to speculate if the Church knows what dust is, or just assumes that it is evil.

from stockterra.com

It will be interesting to find out where Pullman will go with this.  The story is obviously anti-established church, but I’m curious about why the church is wrong from Pullman’s perspective.  So far the Church is depicted as being extremely overbearing and judgmental but I guess I have to wait and see if there are any other direct connections to the established church in our world.

Often, when I try to lucid dream I awake upon realizing that I am in a dream.  Alice doesn’t do this, but maybe she never realizes that she is dreaming.  I don’t know, we’ll see what happens…

One of my favorite parts of the book was when Lyra came out to meet Iorek before he fights Iofur.  I am drawn to Iorek’s character because of his steadfastness.  In this scene, Lyra feels extremely bad for putting him in a position like this, she apologizes profusely.  However Iorek is amazed that she has tricked Iofur and knows then that he can doubtlessly beat him beacuse he has lost his bear sences.   He does trick Iofur eventually while fighting by acting that he was injured.  This scene is on p.256.  It is great how Iorek just walks in and begins talking to the bears like he owns the place.  Of course he does and everyone knows it after he gets done ripping Iofur to shreds.

Awesome!

from www.pcimagenetwork.com