TITLE: Reve (Dream)
NAME: Noe Falzon
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: noe.falzon@tiscali.fr
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nf_reve.jpg
ZIPFILE: nf_reve.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 6

RENDER TIME: 
    12 minutes 50 secondes

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 2.53GHz + 1Go DDR-SDRAM DualChannel

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

As the topic is surrealism, I decided to choose a subject quite close to it :
the dream. As we know it, surrealists had a very particular way to compose
their art : most of them used what is called "automatism of thinking", because
they thought that the subconscious was able to make great things by itslef,
without the help of the consciousness. Miro (a Spanish painter) used to say
something like this : "When I am seeking for inspiration, I come to my little
house, and close all the windows. Then I wait until it is night and I lie on my
bed. I look my ceilling and then, as I'm falling asleep, I see these beautiful
things in the darkness."
Furthermore, we all know (thanks to our own experience), that dreams are often
strange, in the same way that surrealistic works are strange. This is why I
choosed to make an image about dreams.

I read a few things about dreams, but the most interesting was the book written
by Freud about interpretation of dreams. It really inspired me for my image, so
I will tell you a few things about Freud's work (I'm not an native English
speaker, and neither a psychanalist, so I may make big mistakes about the words
I'll use in this text. I apologize for any eventual error) :
The dream is the keeper of the sleep. People always have things to do, or
desires to accomplish. If there were nothing against that, people would not
sleep, because they would (unconsciously) think it is a waste of time to sleep.
But as sleep is vital, we have a way to keep the human beeing asleep : it is
the dream. Freud thinks that the subconscious shows you and makes you live your
desires, so you don't have the idea to wake up. It is the base of his theory.
The subconscious will, to keep you asleep, simulate your greatest (or nor so
great) desires and wishes, until you have enough slept.
But, there is a little hurdle : the subconscious also has the role to keep
secret your deepest thought for your own comfort. It erases bad memories, for
example, so you can live better. Said otherwise, it tries to prevent that these
toughts go from subconscious to consciousness (what you can really remember,
what you think, what you know about you and what surrounds you, etc.).

So, to keep you asleep while not reavealing too much of the secret thoughts, the
subconscious must compose, "make" a dream, to transform the basic thoughts the
"ideas" of the dream, into the coded scene you actually live. The ideas always
contain at least one thing you encountered the day before you sleep (it is
called the trigger idea). To create the coded dream, it uses four mechanisms :
- "staging" : each "idea" of the dream has to be represented by something in
your dream. This representation can be a bit altered, or not, or very altered.
Quite often, the ideas are represented by symbolic objects (like in surrealism
sometimes). So your house can appear as your neighbour's one, but you'll know
it is yours. If there is a dog in your dream, it can be there to represent any
animal, etc.
- "condensation" : several ideas can be represented into only one element in the
dream. So a dancing elephant with your sister's head can represent three ideas
: dance, animal (elephant), family member (mother). That is why there are often
more ideas than elements in the actual dream.
- "shifting" : to scramble even more the main idea of the dream (the one that
will make you sleep), the subconscious changes the importance of each element.
The most important idea will be just a detail in the dream, while a lot of
other ideas will get more evident.
- "reworking" : once each original idea has found a representation in the dream,
the whole thing is mixed again, so the elements get a order deprived of
meaning.

Freud, knowing all these mechanisms (after studying his onw dreams), explains
that it is quite easy to disassemble the dream to get back to the original
thought. He warns the reader anyway : it can be dangerous to know what we
really think, because it could cause troubles like nervous breakdown.

All the elements of my image have a relation with dreams, as I will explain it
in the next section.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The central element of the image is a brain, because the brain is the part of
the body where conscience, subconscience and so on, dreams are all from. You'll
notice this is where the light come from. The brain is a mesh I found on the
web (sorry I cannot remember where).

Under the brain there is a kind of tower. It is a car park. Don't ask why, I
once saw this thing in a dream and it was a car park. So I put is there because
I thought it could make a nice central element. I chose neat reflective
surfaces because in dreams, there are often not natural things. This
corresponds well to surrealism. The whole object is just CSG with a macro to
make the surrounding steps.

Around this central tower, I put a ring of strange shaped flying water. This is
a symbolic representation of an enclosure, a fence like a customs at a
frontier. It is there to show the separation of concsious and subconscious. The
object is a blob which spheres are placed randomly around the tower. You can
notice that the ring is half transparent, which means that some ideas can pass,
while other cannot.

Flying over the ring, there are four bubbles clusters, made in the same material
than the ring. They represent each one one of the four mechanism of the
creation of a dream. They are over the frontier ring, because they are the ones
that make the "ideas" allowed to pass or not. They are also blobs.

At the background, on the right side, there is a library. This library shows the
incredible amount of information that a human brain can contain. Furthermore,
it can be understood as the memory from which are taken all the ideas of a
dream. The library was made with the Library macro (slightly modified so there
is no titles on the books), written by the wonderful Gilles Tran.

At the left background, there is a bed. The bed is typicaly the place where you
sleep, and so, where you dream. The structure is modelised with sphere splines
and CSG. The mattress is a superquadric ellipsoid, with a texture that make the
wavy sheets effect.

The element on the left foreground is a totaly surreal shape which represents
Freud, as a strange object can be someone in a dream. The surface is
reflective, because Freud used to reflect a lot ! (Honnestly, puns can happen
in dreams.) This is a sphere sweep.

On the right, this strange thing is the combination of an eye and a flower
("condensation" mechanism). As for the tower, the shapes and textures are
really stylised, in a surrealistic fashion. The eye is a surface of revolution,
and the other parts are CSG.

The whole scene is included in a high landscape covered by weird bubbles. The
hills are a height field, and these bubbles have been created with the MakeSnow
macro, again by the magical Gilles Tran. Notice the disproportion between all
the sizes of the elements. It is common in dreams to have objects suddenly
bigger or tiny.

All the light colored splotches on the hills represent the ideas of a dream :
hard to distinguish, a bit sallow and not substantial. They are made with
simple light sources spread over the heightfield with a macro adapted from the
one written by Marc Jacquier for his on-line POV-Ray tutorial.

Finnaly, it is a night scene, as the sky is dark, as dreams often happen in
darkness and night.

Remerciements :
Je souhaite remercier tout le POV-monde qui a su m'accueillir dans leur joyeuse
communaut_, et tout particuli_rement Marc, Fabien et Thierry qui m'ont pr_t_ du
pr_cieux temps processeur, et qui m'ont aid_ _ terminer l'image gr_ce _ leur
conseils avis_s, malgr_ la "last minute panic" ! Merci encore !