Abstract

The Prototype of the VR-experience DREAM SCREEN takes users on a contemplative journey to the limits of human consciousness. Within the framework of artistic research, the project is dedicated to the fascinating potentials of five unique phenomena of consciousness: lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences as well as transpersonal and psychedelic experiences. In a speculative manner, personal accounts, experimental VR sequences, and scientific discourses from the fields of psychology, neurobiology, and philosophy are interwoven artistically. Through interactive elements such as eye-tracking and blink-control, users can decide how far to immerse themselves in the experiential spaces of the explored phenomena. Real experiences are interwoven with subjective imagination and speculative reflection. In the audiovisual collage, the users get immersed in a technologically supported meditation on extraordinary states of consciousness and can reflexively comprehend them. DREAM SCREEN stands for an immersive, somnambulistic realm of expanded perception, which is realized through documentary fragments and current VR-technology.