Lucid dreaming refers to the act of dreaming while being aware of the dream itself. In a lucid dream, the dreamer can somehow control the dream, like its development and the characters involved. I’ve always been fascinated by lucid dreaming, often being a lucid dreamer myself. Lucid dreaming is the exactly opposite act than hallucinating. During hallucinations, the person has to cope with dreams colliding with reality in unpredictable fashions. The struggle is to discern what’s real and what’s not. During hallucinations, the person is stuck, has no control. While lucid dreaming, instead, the person is the architect of the dream itself. Everything is possible, everything seems and behaves like it is real, and while the dreamer’s logic guides the dream, the dreamer’s creativity generates a whole world accordingly.
My creative work has a lot to do with lucid dreaming, as I daily use my last half an hour of sleeping to “work” on new concepts. I use my logic side to set the scenario or the characters, and then I let my dream to work on the details. Most of the times I end up dreaming about something completely different, but from time to time I get that extra step the gets the original concept closer to a dream, something I can actually work on.
Take this month, for example, when Catherine, an Italian model who I already photographed in October, called me to let me know she would have been in town and she would have liked to photograph together. She expressed the wish to do some “beauty” shots, meaning headshots and close-ups. I always listen to my models wishes, both because they are happier and more focused when I do, and because I like to be inspired by new ideas-approaches. Headshots where so far from all the concepts I was working on at the moment, that I had to try some lucid dreaming to see if I could find any interesting approaches.
Last time I photographed Catherine I worked with flashes and gelatins in an underground parking. I used green and pink gelatins and I integrated their light with the parking lights. I called the set “the weirdest dream” for the way it ended (totally unpredicted, when we started shooting). That mood, those lights, they must have stuck in my mind, because when I finally started dreaming about Catherine she was lit by those same lights (plus a third, blue light). In the dream the lights were moving, their shapes changing, sometimes creating and dissolving textures. Beside Catherine, everything else was darkness.
At that point I pushed myself to woke up. In my experience with lucid dreaming, it is important not to linger too long in the lucid dream, because there’s always the risk to lose control, start dreaming something else, and eventually forget the first dream all together.
When Catherine arrived I unrolled the black background, I fixed the green, blue, and pink gelatins on my Yongnuo flashes, plugged them in the Yongnuo receivers, and placed the lights around her. I wanted the green and blue lights to paint Catherine’s shape, so I placed both of them behind her. I put a softbox in front of the green light so to soften it, while I left the blue light with no diffuser, so to keep it harsh and metallic on the skin. Then I gave to Catherine the special prop I had planned to use to get the “dissolving textures” I had dreamed about: a colander!
I asked Catherine, from time to time, to hold the colander in front of the pink, frontal light, so that the light could weirdly flow through its multitude of little holes and strike Catherine’s face unpredictably. Besides lights and shadows, I played with Catherine’s hair and tried different clothes, till I found a few stiles I really liked.
I only used the X-T10 with the Fujinon 56mm, the aperture fixed at f/10, 1/125th of shutter speed, and 250 ISO.
In the next days I published some shots on my portfolio on Vogue Italia’s website, and the photos created enough interest to have a couple of new models to contact me, offering to pose for the “project”. So far I managed to schedule a second shooting with Miriam Imperatore, a young model from Rome, with whom I worked on refining the concept a bit and add new poses and angles. Miriam looks a lot like Cristina Ricci, and as Cristina she’s really intense and melancholic.
The results are pretty close to what I “lucid dreamed” about. But for one thing. The lights, in the dream, were constantly moving and changing. Sure, that’s the limit about photography, nothing really changes once it has been shot. However, I am currently experimenting on a way to overtake this boundary. It has to do with creating lots of copies of the same image differing in color post-production together with time-lapse tools. The result is far from being perfect, but it still shows what I have in mind, which is pretty close to what I dreamed about. Here it is, I hope you’ll like it!
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