White Space
Arianne Zhang
White Space is a personal documentation of my experiences with lucid dreaming. The book is structured like a musical rhapsody, a unified piece with a free spirit featuring a spectrum of variation that is episodic yet integrated. Like a song, the value of this work is not in its ability to instruct readers, but in its ability to provide an emotional connection for others struggling with sleep disorders and mental illness.
Rooted in references to classical music, the book explores the relationship between nightmares and high-functioning depression. It introduces lucid dreaming as a metaphor for escaping rigid systems of living in the waking world. The graphics weave back and forth from beginning to end between hopeless and hopeful perspectives to create a singular vision of experiencing an ongoing waking nightmare accompanied by frequent actual nightmares. Even within this constant negative outlook on life, fleeting moments of lucidity exist.
In a sequence with relative consistency, White Space’s layout design aims to mimic the disorientation that plagues the subconscious mind by using AI to generate images of distorted figures and landscapes in combination with lyrical text written in first-person. Dichotomies of light and dark, real and fake, and freedom and captivity bounce back and forth throughout varying layouts to describe my own chaotic and contradictory thought process. It has a numerical structure as the visuals operate on multiples of two and three. Black spreads wrap the book as a state of peace.