Progress Presentation 2 - Reflection

After lots of researching, worrying, sleepless nights into trying to hone down my semiotics plan, through subliminal messaging to visual metaphors over the past few weeks, I thought I'd found what I was looking for.  It was pointed out that I had found a better, simpler research topic now.  I was also challenged on my visual metaphor of my pocket watch idea.  To recap, my idea of the pocket watch as it floats through space at the beginning and ending of the piece is to represent on the conscious level, the possession of the Captain and to suggest the time period.  On the subconscious level my idea is that it's a metaphor for hypnotism as the whole piece is about perception, is it or isn't it real, hallucination or spiritualism, ghosts or illusion?  It was suggested in my presentation that this is just referencing.  I tried to explain that the pocket watch's hypnotism plan was the subliminal level and that it only came across as referencing because I had given this information over already, but i'm not sure i communicated this well.  Since then I have tried to find some reference material to back my idea up.  At present I am reading "Metaphor & Film" by Trevor Whittock which is proving to be invaluable.  There is a quote of Aristotle

"It is proper, to derive metaphors... from objects which are closely related to the thing itself but which are not immediately obvious"

my reasoning is that the pocket watch is closely related to hypnotism but not immediately.  If i was to swing it in front of the viewers face then that would be the relation (or the reference as it was challenged) to hypnotism, which isn't the intended visual act.
Reading on into the book, it states an argument for visual metaphors that:

"...metaphor challenges the received catergories by means of which we realize our experience, may metaphor not be setting up false connections and weakening our grasp on the real world?"

this also reflects my idea of the hallucination and what is real and what is not.

Having only recently decided on the actual visual style, and now being abstract, it was stated by a couple of people that they couldn't visualise the outcome, or that it kept changing.  I'm going to be frank that I was under the impression that the whole process is about evolving an idea and to let it change and grow and not to have a definitive structure from the start and be unswayed into developing it.  So I really didn't understand where the problem lay at this stage.  For me the visual developing comes from the testing and design, the pre-production process which has only just started, so to be honest I have no idea if there is a problem in these comments.
I do have a concern about one other comment regarding the Exposition.  As this is a big chunk of my project and part of the whole concept therefore I am needing clarification that it is possible for the installation of a projector rather than just being shown on a computer monitor.
So summing up, the stress levels are pretty high at this stage already.