Pandemic Dreams

I had crazy dreams during the pandemic :D  The New York Times wrote an article about how  anxiety from COVID-19 resulted in many people to have dreams that "felt unusually real and emotional and bizarre". I've always had the habit of writing down my dreams every morning, and starting around March 2020 I also noticed my dreams were all incredibly vivid, sometimes terrifying, and often weird.

I thought it would be fun to visualize these dreams, but I'm terrible at painting. When OpenAI released DALLE-2, I was incredibly excited! I could now use text and a bit of prompt engineering to create the physically implausible scenes and wacky events of my pandemic dreams. I presented a subset of these images co-created w/ DALLE-2, at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023 AI Art Gallery. But I wasn't too happy with the results, since I felt like I didn't have that much fidelity over the content: the generated images didn't capture the aesthetic "feel" I wanted. So I recently succumbed and paid for a Midjourney subscription and am much happier, with the results, shown below :) 

[each dream is shown as an image carousel to flip through the different scenes]