Cabon
Lucid Dream
Lucid Dream is an immersive and sensory experience taking the audience into an ethereal world made of crystals, lights, refraction, sounds and smoke.
The experience is a reminder of the importance of taking time for oneself, and the profound benefits that can come from simply slowing down and being fully present in the moment.
Lucid Dream provides a space for wonder, awe, and entering a dream state.
More about the story of the project below...
Video: Leah Martin
Lucid Dream was a 3+ years project that started from my bedroom, within the 80cm I had between my bed and the cupboards to craft a system to hold prisms and project a beam of light onto them, to a sold out full-scale public event in Camden, London.
Video: Leah Martin
The Birth of the Project
2021
It all started in my small bedroom in Paddington, after very long days in my office job, having a need to find peace. Working with lights and prisms was a practice for myself, entering a meditative state and being fully present in what I was doing. It simply consisted of prisms and a flashlight, playing with angles and looking at the colours.
I merged my photography hobby to the prism play, capturing the peacefulness of these lights and colours in the camera, and printing the pictures on large scale frames.
It was a great way to soothe and calm down emotions just by looking at the prints.
Playing with prisms and taking pictures was mostly my way to get into a meditative state, but I would sometimes have the company of friends who always shared the fascination with the rays of lights and deep colours shining in the room.
I thought it may be a fun project to develop an immersive experience in a large environment where people would be inside these rays of light and get into that peaceful and meditative state I got on my own.
I started designing the concept with prototypes.
The Mock-Up at Soho House
2022
The mock-up of the installation was first displayed at Soho House in Brixton during a What Does Not event, where it sparked interest from visitors.
The installation was minimal, and definitely not up to what I had envisioned for the project - but it gave me the motivation to scale it up and have an audience who would come to experience the lights in a better way.
Video: Matthew Rowley
The Crowdfunding and Solo Show
2022
After this mock-up, I wanted to have a solo Lucid Dream event. I raised funds through a crowdfunding campaign that exceeded the objective (at 111%). Raising funds was a project on its own, and nerve wracking as it was the only way I could offer the next stage of Lucid Dream to a wider audience.
It was a privilege to showcase the experience in a stunning venue in central London, where the audience could be fully immersed and get a better sense of the vision I had for Lucid Dream. As I was running the event, I was noticing all the points to improve and I developed more of a drive to get it to the next level.
Video: Adam Stevens
The Studio and Lucid Dream V2
2023
Working in a bedroom reached its limit and the need of a studio space became critical to get better equipment and use a dedicated space to be more focused. I was seeking more collaboration and spending time with other artists and finding a place which met all of those criteria wasn't easy and was usually very expensive.
A couple of months into my search, one of my dear friends forwarded me an email that almost got lost in her spam folder, announcing the opening of a new site in Camden from Proposition Studios. I was lucky to get that email and even more to be accepted in their community and new building.
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I started experimenting with new light systems, enabling me to have more control over them, and quickly ended up testing out this new version. It was still work in progress, as I didn't master the art of lights control (yet), but it was getting very close to what I had envisioned at the beginning of the project.
Despite it being a rough test, I was struck by how many people came to have a look and their response was very positive.
Manifesting the Initial Vision - Lucid Dream V3 & Finale
2024
Bringing the Lucid Dream experience closer to what I had initially envisioned meant having a really cool custom made soundtrack and a fully automated light show in perfect sync.
I spent countless late nights the following months after my day job, to compose the music and synchronise the lights down to the millisecond to get the most seamless effects.
And it worked.
The last step was to put together an event for friends and the general public to attend.
News landed that the building where our studios were located would have to be vacated shortly for destruction. It took a lot of coordination to be able to present the experience in the best possible gallery available right before the building would be taken down.
After a lot of stressful last minute changes and communicating to friends, family, and whoever I would cross in the streets of London (!), it was finally all ready for the big finale, with a goodbye to Proposition Studios Camden, that hosted us for a year and a half and the brilliant team who helped us acheive so much.
Kudos to Anna, Alice, Siena, JB and all the staff for the endless support. That journey wouldn't have happened without them at Proposition Studios.
Here are the pictures of the public event, featuring Mote and Turlough for music and lots of good vibes.
A big thank you to the photographers who have done a stunning job: Crispian Blaize, Candice Liebeck, and special thanks to the videographer Leah Martin who has gone above and beyond to get the fantastic footage and interview at the top of the page.
Thank you!
Thank you to all my friends and family for having supported me in this adventure, it's been a pleasure to work on this project and to bring an idea into reality. I hope I shared some of that enthusiasm with the modest circles around me, and who knows, maybe one day reopening the boxes and bringing the Lucid Dream experience back to life.
