Hello!
You are about to read Taming Amorphalia. It is a fictional documentation of the intrapersonal happenings and experiments that led to the creation of ProjectMorpheo, my degree work at Stockholm University of the Arts.
ProjectMorpheo was – and still is – a participatory experience designed to explore the fragile connections between the content of our dreams and the physical materials that surround us, using tarot cards to lead participants from their dreams to a certain material such as wood, paper or soil.
I was motivated to create both ProjectMorpheo and Taming Amorphalia by my own struggle with different sleep disorders, including insomnia and sleeping paralysis, for more than eight years now. I wanted to draw attention to these issues, which are not taken as seriously as – for example – eating disorders, despite sleep being just as important for a healthy life as eating. And I believe that paying attention to our dreams is a way of maintaining a connection to our inner life without using any mind-altering substances.
Dreaming is my way to gain a better understanding of the workings of the feedback loop between the life I live in the common reality and the one I live in my own reality, where I am surrounded by my feelings and my thoughts. I created Taming Amorophalia to introduce this process to others.
I wanted to keep the participatory form in the documentation of this project in order to explain the relationships between certain reappearing spaces and symbols in my dreams. I believe that is makes much more sense: there are many things aspects I am not able to recount with technical terms and professional jargon. So I offer you a game to play, through which I hope is that it will help you relate to this artistic research better than photo-documentation and a step-by-step process journal would. You will understand some things about it with your intellect, while others rely much more on your intuition.
A sense of disorientation is part of this game; this is why it doesn’t have a linear structure. It is more like a maze or a spiderweb – the more you walk through it, the better you will understand the connections.
The format of this game was inspired by the writing of Péter Farkas, called Hypertext; Dungeons and Dragons adventures; Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch; old detective books, and text-based RPGs. It is also the format in which I am most comfortable when explaining my mind's working in an artistic process.
But enough aboout me and these 'reality' things.