By Mithran Akattutu

The Cube of Kamloops Art Gallery is showcasing a digital media artwork named Astral created by Autumn Christopher, a Thompson Rivers University (TRU) graduate. Astral is a media project that explores lucid dreams and astral projection. Astral projection is understood as an out-of-body experience of subconscious travel. Christopher initiated this project for his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree final project. The piece consists of paintings, digitally rendered images and animation that captures his lucid dreams and moments.

Craig Williams, Assistant Curator of Kamloops Art Gallery, chose this piece for the exhibition at The Cube that shares work done by recent TRU graduates. The Cube allows emerging artists an opportunity to work with a professional curator to showcase their work and create new work.

In Astral, Christopher cites Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body and his personal dream journal to map the subconscious experiences through digital animation and imagery. Inspired by Japanese animation, style and anime music videos, Christopher tells the story of his lucid dreams that he recorded in his journal. Japanese animation is popular than American animation because it caters to all types of audience, both kids and adults. It gives more maturity and character development whereas American animation is mainly intended for entertaining kids. Japanese animation has a distinct look to it with defined outlines for characters and places. The more frames it has the more realistic it looks, especially for action scenes. “I really enjoy watching anime and that is why I chose to do my project in that style”, said Christopher.

During the interview, Christopher said he has up to five dreams a night and highlights in his journal what is important and not. These highlights are his reference points to animate to create the story. The whole piece consists of three unrelated dreams. As the video opens, the main character, Christopher, makes eye contact with a girl in his dream. The majority of the people in his dreams, he said, “feels like NPC’s (Non-Performing Character) in a video game”, but this girl and their shared moment “felt very real and intimate” to him. After then we see a house with a forest in the background. Christopher claims that the previous night, when he was having problems falling asleep, he was practicing lucid dreaming. We move onto seeing one frame of a hairy ape looking creature which he explained it to be a “nice Bigfoot”. He had nightmares about Bigfoot and tried thinking about a nice bigfoot to dream about, which ended up happening. Christopher says this is an example of how your thoughts can affect and control your dreams. A study conducted by Erick Klinger, Division of Social Sciences in University of Minnesota, looks into how contents of thoughts and dreams are affected by an individual’s goals. Studies conducted by Klinger shows that “goal-related stimuli influence dream content much more reliably than other stimuli”. Towards the end, we see a dark figure holding a scythe with a snake companion who later combine into a man that talks to Christopher. He explained that when this dream happened, he was

trying to face his fears which somehow transformed into a man, and he was able to talk to him about astral projection.

Art being Christopher’s hobby and passion, he created this project to share his experiences of lucid dreaming and to inspire others to create art. Astral creates an experience for the viewer to consider the possibilities of travel in other levels of consciousness. He said this is an ongoing project that he will continue working on among other projects. Christopher uses Capcut, a video editing app to edit and piece together the Astral.

Autumn Christopher (Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux) was born and resides in Kamloops. Christopher received his BFA from TRU in 2022. He is currently working on a mural for the old Fortune Motel in Kamloops on behalf of the Canadian Mental Health Association. He plans to go to Emily Carr University of Art + Design to get a master’s degree. Emily Carr University is an internationally recognized university in design, media and technology. They are ranked 24th in the world.

Astral is being showcased at The Cube from September 17th to December 31st, 2022.