Quarantine Dream Landscape
Dreams are hard to capture, let alone communicate. Through his project, we visualised Quarantine Dreams as a landscape for you to walk through.
Dream Collaboration ?
with Sabhyata Jain
March 24th, nationwide lockdown had been announced in India leaving most of us anxious, a little bit scared and generated the need to feel productive. With the sudden spike in screen time we came across each other’s work and discovered a shared interest in data.
Simran : Bro Lets Collab 🙌
Sabhyata : I was thinking the same 🙌
Simran : This way we will be able to help each other, no point trying to bang our heads alone!
Sabhyata : 😎
We found ourselves talking about evolving lifestyles during the pandemic. This conversation ignited a string of thought around our shared experiences of weird dreams.
We started noticing changes in our personal lives and sleep patterns.
Intrigued by our own experience we decided to understand what was happening with people around us. We soon realised our experience was not an isolated occurance.
We sent out an open invite to people over social media to tell us about their dreams. Based on a bit of secondary research and our experience we asked questions related to sleep, dreams, lifestyle and stress.
In the span of two weeks, 200 people responded.
On closing our survey, we wanted to record our immediate reactions. We each decided to do a quick visualisation challenge with data from the first 10–20 entries. We decided to use every person’s data as a unit. We began to look at “units” in architecture as inspiration.
We noticed three clear patterns of sleep cycles — disturbed, restless and peaceful. Dreams had recurring themes(i.e. Home, Family, Violence, Covid Related etc). Similarly stress levels and its associated themes were studied.
Through this process, we understood our limitations with the data set and realised how layered the information is. We knew we would have to try a new approach with our data visual. One thing we knew we wanted to keep was the “unit” system.
Deep Diving Into Dreams
At this point we realised most of our data was qualitative. Our next step was clubbing data that showed distinct patterns. We began to analyse trends in the dataset. To our surprise there were many repeating themes. In addition, we cleaned the dataset and discarded all the null entries.
- We divided the entire dataset into three major broad themes: sleep, dream and stress
- We started understanding the shift in sleep and its various reasons. We clubbed similar reasons together.
- Then we moved to people’s dream descriptions and highlighted major keywords. Over a period of 6 days we further analysed and clubbed it under broader categories. Similarly we categorised stress.
“Constantly running away from an evil person ( mostly a man) in the pursuit of saving myself or someone else.”
Polka dots fever
We came across Yayoi Kusama’s work. Her visual treatment inspired us to develop a dream flower landscape that is informed by data.
We attributed each part of a flower to each variable:
- Shift in Sleep : Pistil / Stamen
- Sleep & Dream Themes : Petals
- Stress : Stem & Levels
Simplifying & Reducing Complexity
While narrowing down to a single concept, we realised our explorations were not as elegant as the content (data). We wanted something that was more soothing to the eye. Taking our “flower” as a unit we began exploring again.
At this point we also asked ourselves: who are we making this for? There are two types of people consuming any information : Skimmers & In depth readers. How can our visualisation aid both of them?
In addition, striking a balance between form and fuction. Our visualisation had an innate bias of being artistic than functional. We took a step back from the data we had internalised. We saw our visualisation from the eye of a third person.
For the final version (go to top) we locked on a watercolour based treatment to draw a contrast between an intangible concept versus a manual medium. In addition, the treatment itself helped us provide a dreamy and muted landscape. The colours and each variable could be layers on top of each other mixing seamlessly just like dreams.
This project survived two full time jobs, moving cities, pandemic paranoia, dengue, friends getting covid, us assuming we have covid every time we have a headache, and a million I give up moments. We can’t believe we are finally writing the finishing note. Hope this project finds you safe. Take a break from work, news and zoom calls. Keep dreaming :)
