I am at the door and they see me. Frightened I run up the white stairs, winding around. They are moving as a group in dark clothes across the tarmac, stark as knives in the glare of light. Their pleated black coats, heavy. My daughter flies up the stairs, "It's okay, they're here to visit, not to hurt you." Distrustful, I descend the stairs.
The foyer which is where I live has become a studio but is still a garage. Its gilded mirrors and high ceilings and brocaded ceiling and graceful wainscoting and trim seem as Renaissance as their Shakespearean coats. My paintings hang everywhere.
Where am I? This is no place that I've ever seen before. The hardwood floors gleam, light pours baroquely in through leaded glass windows. The mantle over the fireplace is magnificent white marble with Corinthian columns on either side. I can breathe in this elegant place.
A friend who emerges from the group waves her arm and shows me my space and shows me that I need not fear and leaves. I want to hover in her vision of me for it is not my own.
Another woman in black leather with blonde hair is standing astride a motorcycle at the opened garage door, so perfect for a studio, to have a door that unfolds on rollers and slides up, and I would like her to stay, to visit, to talk, but she roars off.
I wake to heavy fertile rain falling outside the window.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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An absolutely stunning dream - thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm no psychotherapist ... but ... in your story, I heard your voice questioning your validity / value / talent. You are encouraged by others to believe in the huge gift that you have, but are unable to really trust in their vision of you as great artist. Perhaps this is a clue that a small part of you does know that your work is important?
I'm struck also by that experience of longing for someone to stay and witness ... the friend, the motorcyclist ... needing their energy to support the part of you that believes, that wants to say it believes.
I'm sure all this is known by you. I just wanted to echo it, to show that I listened and heard something powerful.
I had a vivid dream myself last night. I'm wondering how easy you have found it to come back to here, and now, or whether today you are partly still there, moving through the dream space?
Thanks for sharing,
xx
Needed: space for painting. Setting your intentions? ;-)
ReplyDeleteStray, I've had so many dreams through the years about painting that you'd think I'd just do it! It's messy, takes up too much space, costly, and painting is like putting my life on the line each time and it literally takes a piece of my soul I'm sure and so I tend to mostly avoid it unless really compelled to work on something. But dreams like this seem to indicate that painting is part of my life path and I shouldn't resist it. Thank you for such an indepth reading of the dream, and for being so supportive.
ReplyDeleteIn this post I attempted to write the dream as magical fiction, as prose poetry, in the active voice. The dream was so quiet, like angels murmuring under the flowers, voices under the rocks, yet when I wrote it in the style that I am attempting, it blossomed into a piece that had action, colour, texture and perhaps even meaning. I am surprised at how vivid it became.
Perhaps I'm recommending writing our dreams more from the vantage of the dreaming consciosness than from the vantage we usually do.
MB, I never pick spaces to live in with painting in mind and hence I really struggle to work when the pressures to do so become too great. Where I am now I am restricted to page-sized work in a non-messy media like watercolour pencils. It's ridiculous that I do this. I am a floor painter with gallons of water and oils and there is not one square inch in this tiny basement apartment to set a canvas down for the week or so it needs to dry.
If I am to honour my painterly side I need to house myself in a more appropriate abode. Though how at this point is absolutely unknown... It's not just the needs of my daughter, dog, thesis (meaning my collection of 2000 books need to come in here too), et al, but now the painter wants out too! Oy! And all on a budget way too small to offer any easy options or much freedom. We'll see what transpires. As they say, where there's a will there's a way!
I think that's very interesting, the voice we take when writing dreams. Yesterday, trying to capture mine, I was battling against a need to Make Sense, where dreams are Senses not Sense. I find myself clawing for colours and sounds and dimensions that do not translate to 26 characters and punctuation. You are on to something ... it feels powerful.
ReplyDeleteI think resistance is clearly futile where painting is concerned in your life. And I, for one, am glad. I don't doubt that it is exhausting, emotionally, mentally, even physically, but god, if I could paint like that, I'd be beside myself.
It seems that painting is your passionate but demanding lover? When you give yourself completely, it loves you back, but to do so, to not hold back, is agony in finding the courage?
what a fine dreamscape to fall into - passion, excitement, color, even a balance to the fear. I'm jealous.
ReplyDeleteStray, you write with such knowing about tumultuous passion with our art that you must know this from first hand experience. I find writing easier in that you can revise. With the way I paint, it's half accident, it's what the paint does with guidance and it's like a birth - as tense, will it be born whole, or will I do something to ruin it by interferring too much? There's a 'zen' state of mind to it - if you aren't one with the medium, it can't sing.
ReplyDeleteNarrator, yes, I am quite blessed to no longer be left fearful and confused by nightmares... wish the same for you. And then it became about the way of writing. xo
With the way I paint, it's half accident, it's what the paint does with guidance and it's like a birth - as tense, will it be born whole, or will I do something to ruin it by interferring too much?
ReplyDeleteI really relate to this. I am lucky that I sometimes get to make films as part of my work - something I used to do full time but found too stressful. Now, I only do it a few times a year, and I find that the key to producing something which has its own life, its own integrity, is to use the lightest touch possible in drawing the story onto the screen.
When it works, I manage to engage the talented crafts people I work with - camera, sound, editor - with the spirit of that story, and then stand back and just not get in the way. The moment I stop being gentle, stop listening, stop allowing the story to shape the process rather than the other way around, it begins to go wrong.
I have always been baffled in particular by how artists, painters in particular, know when to say "enough". I understand the analogy with human birth, but I'm sure when you were engaged in that process there was a very binary split between birthing and born! I am amazed at how you are sensitive to that moment when working with a medium which is so fluid, which changes as it dries and hardens, which is affected by the changing light of day ...