Stealing from myself

The ideas that bubble up freely in dreams can be channeled if you let yourself be inspired by the irrational connections your brain makes when unchecked by the conscious ego that regulates the thoughts by day. Dion Soethoudt’s dream book ‘Stealing From Myself’ serves as a first step towards an ego-free design method.

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Should designers recalibrate their ego within their work?

The ego can destroy anything, especially in the creative industry. This not likely to change, looking at the increasing responsibilities put on designers as they are baptised as the problem-solvers of the world. Next, to fixing the world, we are often faced with a hunger for recognition, since it’s an industry where the recognition of your work or yourself has a direct effect on the numbers.

Struggling with my own levels of creativity induced anxieties. I started exploring ways of recalibrating my ego within my work. Being an imaginative dreamer I took the drawings of my dreams seriously, during 10 months of illustrating the narratives of my sleep, I came across an intriguing character who would keep on reoccurring in my dreams. This character, who, oppositely, he would be named ‘Apollo’, was constantly creating ‘things’, using extraordinary methods that seemed as surprising and convincing as the highly original ideas he would come up with.

The Romans believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, a genius.

Apollo takes away the ego from the equation. They are not my idea’s they are his, I just steal them. This perspective on creativity limits the pursuit of self-preservation in my works. This project can be seen as a first attempt to develop an ego-free and design method.

‘Stealing From Myself’ became a 320 page book. A limited print of 200 copies, each and every copy signed by Dion Soethoudt.

• Language: English  /  Height: 24cm  /  Width 17,5cm
• Preface by Prof. Catelijne van Middelkoop
• Concept, design & illustrations by Dion Soethoudt
• Printed by Baltoprint


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Press kit download:
press_stealing-from-myself.zip