For "You Are My Sunshine", i thought a lot about the concept of dreams versus reality. there's an idea that the two are diametrically opposed somehow; the word "dream" often implies fantasy and non-reality, something that does not or cannot exist. But i feel that this linguistic binary isn't always accurate to actual life, because reality often (i would go as far as to say nearly always if not always) influences dreams and vice versa. Our dreams do not exist in a vacuum, whether by dreams we mean the images and narratives we experience while we are sleeping, or whether we mean it interchangeably with "goals" and "aspirations". The dreams our subconscious produces are simply a bricolage of images and ideas taken from our lived experiences. Conversely, we act in a way that is in accordance with our hopes for our lives; each of our individual actions is motivated by a wish to bring our personal dreams to fruition. I chose to have the darker, more somber colors interacting with the lighter colors to illustrate this. i felt the slash of red was really necessary to bring the piece together because the difficulty of reconciling dreams and reality inevitably leads to some struggle or pain. For the speaker in the song, this is clear in the lyrics: the speaker wakes, realizes the sweetheart was dreamed or imagined, and hangs their head and cries.

The red also served a further purpose in my response to the song. Of course red has traditionally represented such almost cliched ideas of passion, lust, romantic love, but also blood, and, because of this association, pain. i think this song speaks to the difficulty of human relationships and, again, the inevitability of some hurt or conflict. I also noted that the song tells us nothing about the subject of the lyrics save the speaker's own perception of them. The one-sided perspective along with a lack of specificity creates a rather ambiguous narrative, and the speaker's judgment should be taken into question. After all, relationship implies an other, as well as a self. So i began to think about the way the addressee might feel about the speaker, areas where perceptions of the same events differ, the emotions, dreams, reality of the subject, who is  reduced to a sort of flat, dimensionless object of desire in the lyrics. All of this contributed to my response to the song as rather dark overall, discordant, but with these pockets of light, hope, denial, perhaps irrationality, all interrupted by this tangible presence of passion and pain.