Neuroscientists don’t know exactly where dreams originate inside the human brain. They can’t extract or study a dream itself, only descriptions of a dream, filtered through the memory of the dreamer. And the prevailing scientific explanation of dreams—defragmentation of the memory drives of the mind—somehow fails to satisfy. Recently, I’ve wondered if virtual reality is an attempt to create a kind of waking dream, a world on the boundary line, a way to tap into those hidden corners of the psyche that evade scientific inquiry.
Virtual reality art is on the rise, perhaps accelerated by the pandemic—that collective global experience in which entire years of our lives have been molded and contorted by fear, disease and loneliness. Yet VR is still only a sliver of the overall NFT art market; for example, KnownOrigin.io currently lists only 107 items for sale in the category. We’re used to seeing art that shows us the world outside ourselves. It’s far more rare to discover art that seeks to show us the worlds inside ourselves.
Enter “Astro Dreams” — a collection of fourteen virtual reality experiences paired with three-dimensional music. The series is the result of the combined creative powers of UK-based visual artist Nygilia McClain and Haitian-American composer and producer Phinestro. Each piece is a multi-faceted symphony of light and sound—a dynamic sensory exploration in which every element is perfectly, literally in sync. It can be difficult to capture the essence of art in motion, because every piece is a journey taken in real time. Still, it seems worthwhile to try, because “Astro Dreams” feels utterly unlike any other NFT collection I’ve discovered so far.
Each piece is a multi-faceted symphony of light and sound—a dynamic sensory exploration in which every element is perfectly, literally in sync.
The visual composition of “Astro Dreams” is painterly, characterized by organic shapes, curves and angles; there are no glitches or harshness, and the sense of motion within each dream is sweeping, weightless—often swift but never chaotic. The color work is bold, jewel, neon without being hallucinogenic; the palette is bright yet soothing, toned to perfection. Specific elements appear across the dreams; each piece has a distinguishable entry point, often a circular or spiraling portal followed by dense walls or clouds of pigment, gem-like stepping stones, geometric shapes resembling architectural blueprints. Deconstructed images of nature also recur: prismatic rainbows, flickering lightning, whirling snowflakes, rivers made of liquid light. In particular, “Falling in Heaven” is so coated with stars that it feels like floating inside an incandescent constellation.
How do you build a dream? I don’t typically discuss a collection with the artist(s) before or during my writing process, but in this case I asked Ny to share the technique used to create the visuals of Astro Dreams. She told me that the dreams were brought to life with the Tiltbrush program, which allowed her to paint and animate in three dimensions while wearing an Oculus Quest 2 headset. In parallel, Phinestro composed original three-dimensional audio tracks to match the kinetic journey that a viewer takes within each dream. Pop on a pair of stereo headphones to listen to “Soaring Magician” and you’ll immediately realize the masterful precision of the auditory echoes, fades and transitions as you drift through walls or down spiraling tunnels. To be inside one of the “Astro Dreams” is to find yourself immersed in a melodic, kaleidoscopic landscape of sound and light, to fly, to float, to be freed from the constraints of gravity and the laws of physics.
Pop on a pair of stereo headphones and you’ll immediately realize the masterful precision of the auditory echoes, fades and transitions as you drift through walls or down spiraling tunnels.
A silent, glowing figure waits at the heart of each of the dreams—beings of light, wisdom, mystery, their faces obscured. They are regal, powerful; they wear their hair like crowns and diadems; they are adorned with glowing braids, horns, haloes, wings, feathered capes, masks. These dreamers are one with their world, not inhabitants or colonists “placed” there by the hand of the artist—they are the core, the soul of each dream. These figurative elements of “Astro Dreams” are intentionally surreal, Neo-expressionist in both technique and reference.
There are touches of Basquiat to be found here; the distinctive three-peaked crown the dreamer wears in “I am Forever” is a clear homage. But I also found myself thinking of Ralph Ellison’s 1953 novel The Invisible Man, where the protagonist says: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination.” In this context, the “Astro Dreams” collection is a kind of reimagining and taking back control of the house of mirrors, removing the distortions to show a kind of beauty that is so often, still, made invisible by a refusal to see.
Creative work within the genres of Afro-fantasy and Afro-futurism manifests a belief in the power of the future, a belief that is simultaneously rooted in the trauma of the past. Consider, for a moment, the pain woven into the deepest levels of the Afro-diasporic experience: the history of being made “other” by force, of having every scrap of physical and emotional personhood stripped away. When a people has been so brutally cut off from their past, is it not inevitable that they would seek refuge in dreams of the future? Ytasha L. Womack describes Afro-futurism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation,” while Ingrid LaFleur calls it “a way of imagining possible futures through a Black cultural lens.”
Afro-fantasy is a distinctive form of world-building, continuously directed by the Black speculative imagination and its tradition of magical realism. This kind of creative work—the imagining of a future possible world—requires both optimism and fierce courage. For artists working in the Afro-fantasy genre, it seems necessarily linked to the choice to reclaim stolen, long-withheld power: the power to imagine a different kind of future and to create their own stories about that future.
Over the last weeks, the figures within the “Astro Dreams” have become my nightly companions. That is how I know that they are travelers of light indeed, something like spirit guides, leading me on my own path toward the land of sleep. Again and again, I returned to their light-particle, sound-wave cosmos as I waited for my own dreams, never certain what I’d find on the other side of that veil. Insomniacs learn to make peace with the night, to type out aphorisms and essays (perhaps even ones like these) in the dark, using the Notes app of a phone set to Bedtime Mode hours ago. But we all do eventually have to sleep, to confront the state of our psyches within the dream state, on the other side of the veil of consciousness. And in those long hours spent both seeking and avoiding sleep, it comforted me to be able to seek refuge in the dreams of others.
Ultimately, the “Astro Dreams” collection is fierce, optimistic, pure-hearted art that is reaching for something big and beautiful beyond itself.  Each of the fourteen pieces feels like its own dynamic, multi-dimensional expression of the Afro-fantasy vision: unique, personal, expectant. The depth and complexity of the worldbuilding is also an incredible collaborative accomplishment, unlike anything I have seen in the NFT space so far. With the creation of “Astro Dreams,” these artists have given us a fully-realized experience of an alternate universe, a complete and deeply intentional cosmos.
The “Astro Dreams” collection is fierce, optimistic, pure-hearted art that is reaching for something big and beautiful beyond itself.
Dreams are always fraught with notions of past and future, time and travel, motion and transgression—the not-yet and never-will and forever-gone. And yet, in the waking world, dreaming is the ultimate act of hope; it rips away the label of “not yet” and replaces it with “someday soon, and very soon.” After all, how do you build the future? Usually, it starts with a dream.
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Sources:
All images from the “Astro Dreams” collection used with permission from the artists.