THE PATH OF THE INFINITE DREAM: CONSTRUCTING A PERSONAL MYTH THROUGH ART

Abstract

At its core, this thesis is not about mythology, dreams, or race as isolated subjects. It is about the process of finding and expressing an authentic self within a world structured by inherited systems of meaning. Myth, dreams, symbolism, and cultural context are not the subject of the work; they are the materials through which authenticity is pursued.My artwork explores dreams, intuition, and abstraction as a means of constructing a personal mythology. I am interested in mythmaking as a process: how systems of meaning originate, how they take form through lived experience, and what happens when imagined worlds are rendered tangible. While myths have historically emerged from many sources including religion, nature, and collective ritual; this thesis focuses specifically on dreams and process as a catalyst for myth construction. Through The Path of the Infinite Dream, I build a visual and philosophical framework fixed in a single question: What do you see when you close your eyes? The closed-eye space functions primarily as a method; a site where perception turns inward and imagination becomes an act of being. It is the metaphorical condition that allows the Infinity Planes to emerge; an internal field where dream imagery, symbols, and archetypal forms both exist and are generated. It operates as an environment that can be accessed, but also as a system that produces and organizes what is encountered within it. I treat dreams as real experiences: lived events that demonstrate the mind’s capacity to create worlds. By closing my eyes, sometimes only for minutes, sometimes through brief naps. I am able to access ideas, scenarios, and compositions. Through watercolor, ink, and mixed media, I record entoptic patterns, recurring symbols, and archetypes that emerge from this interior space, and translate them into material form. My practice combines intuition, ritual, and automatic processes to bridge the conscious and unconscious, the seen and unseen. Through repetition and sustained engagement, six archetypal states emerged: The Fall, The Void, The Cloud, The Lightning, The Star, and The Cosmos. Together they form The Path of the Infinite Dream, a cyclical system of creation and destruction symbolically modeled after the life cycle of a star. Each state within the cycle corresponds to a core aspect of the self: desire, mind, emotion, body, spirit, and soul. This thesis presents the core framework of that mythology: a generative symbolic system that will continue to expand beyond this project.