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ON to Project Two: Nightmare Quilt Components
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the nightmare quilt
(sarah cornwell, actlab 11,12.2008)


We don't ask for nightmares.  In dreams, our subconscious minds show us familiar things in unfamiliar ways.  Possible things become impossible and vice versa.  We flout the logic of our daily lives, but we often retain familiar ideas of self.  Dreams are, in this unpredictable wedding of familiar and unfamiliar, quintessentially uncanny.  Nightmares moreso.
worrydolls dreamcatcher
 When I was a child, I hung a Native American dreamcatcher above my bed to snare bad dreams before they could penetrate my sleep.  My mother put Guatemalan worry dolls under my pillow to absorb my worries and fears.  These are charms, objects intended to comfort through the magic of subconscious thought.  The nightmare quilt is the opposite; an anti-charm.  I have made bedclothes out of terror.

I thought when I began to collect nightmares and then to fabricate my quilt that the collective energy of so much fear and trauma would enter my subconscious--that when I finally slept under the nightmare quilt I would have nightmares pregnant with other peoples' nightmares, that I would access underground currents of somnolent thought.

Nope.

When I finally slept under the nightmare quilt, I dreamed I was swimming with my mother in canal waters not meant to be swum in, looking for a pier.  It was not a nightmare, just a dream, weird and intuitive like all my dreams.  I had just returned from a trip to Hungary where my mother and I swam in mosaic-walled bathhouses like great cathedrals.  It made too much sense.  I realized that when I fell asleep that night, I didn't feel any heaviness or conscious foreboding at the prospect of wrapping myself in the fabric of nightmares.  The project left me feeling proud of my work and cleansed, in a way.  I theorize that the fabrication of the nightmare quilt was not an aggregation of negative energy, as I thought it would be, but rather an exorcism.

I asked everyone to articulate and share their subconscious fears.  Many enjoyed it.  Many wanted to talk about their nightmares, compare, question.  I myself drew several nightmares, and it was satisfying to see such personal images slapped into two-dimensions and offered to a community.  In sewing all these dream-offerings together, I made a collective testament to expression--to the idea that even those deepest, most terrible personal horrors can be shared, diffused, and made to seem, by the light of day, not so terrible after all.


 Project Two: nightmare quilt components

Project Three: nightmare quilt fabrication

details of the nightmare quilt: