Recent jots

Tuna was supposed to play guitar for a group of people but he got nervous and lay down on the floor looking sad and tired. I comforted him and reassured him he didn't have to play for those people.

Mom and dad's place of residence? Beautiful large conservatory with a big tree covered in cantaloupe sized pitcher plants and paphiopedilum blooms. I found one HUGE specimen that looked like a hybrid of the two. Red, green, white, purple-brown.

White house. I was told it had been moved off the property. From a distance the property did appear to be vacant of any structure. Gray mist hung over the earth, eerie and sort of boxy in shape, resembling a house. As I approached, a house started to appear slowly, detail by detail. It looked occupied but no one answered when I called out. Old house. Old belongings. Very interesting. View from windows was a city. A bay and the banks were busy with people and boats. Masses of buildings and bridges. The statue of liberty poked her bust and raised arm up out of the bay. Boats whizzed by. This was not New York. Where am I?

In the basement of an old house, I found a large photograph of a cabinet door. It was printed on very heavy cardstock and was warped with water damage. I turned it over and inspected it further and saw that it opened up into a three panel image of the full set of cabinets. It was a free standing unit like an island. Solid dark wood base with a chunky top that had so much wear it looked almost like a leather cushion with how rounded and soft the edges had become and was the color of an olivey emerald. I put the print down and looked around the basement. The cabinet was there. I immediately went to it and knelt down to open the doors. Inside was a set of copper barware. There was a sake carafe and drinking cups. The cups were unlike anything I'd ever seen, curved and molded into such a beautiful and otherworldly shape. The surface was etched with lines like that of a topographic map and seemed to make the curves even more lively and alien. I turned a piece over to look for a maker mark. An extremely detailed image of a demon with huge horns appeared. I turned another cup over to check again. The demon appeared and then started to become three dimensional, rising off the surface detail by detail, the face emerging, the horns elongating, a glimmer of soft yellow light illuminating the tips of the horns from the inside. I twisted the cup in a little circle to see the angles. It was so incredibly detailed, this tiny three dimensional hellish monster on this little intricate copper cup. I turned the cup rightside up and placed it on the island. Perfect sit. Where did this come from??

Halloween costume: take a length of thin leather cord, tie a knot in the end, insert it up your nose and bring it down through your mouth. It came with a lifestyle book about what it means to wear it and belong to a group who all do it together.

Ice skating rink. Tons of people playing hockey. I was just skating around in my sneakers. Left the rink to go outside. Lake surrounded by trees. Entered the woods and part of the lake, where water was running down a small a hill, looked like an oil painting. I went into the woods, snow on the ground, a dead eagle. The deeper I went the more everything turned into the painting. Orange leafed trees above. The water.

2020 Dream Fodder

 For pretty much everyone alive on planet Earth this year, 2020 has been nothing but bad. Or at the very least, extremely off-putting, inconvenient and just plain ew. My Grandmother, mom's mom, my last living grandparent, died just before the turn of the new year on December 29, 2019. Then the pandemic hit in March. I was pretty sick in March and I really wonder if it was Covid-19. Then we poked into the rotting corner in our living room and opened that can of water damaged worms. We moved the cats out in early August to prepare for demolition and repairs. A couple of weeks later, Hank died on August 18th. My baby. Then I got fired in October. We've been dealing with the nightmare of fixing our house, which brings us to month number five of living in my parents' place. It's ok...we're almost done and will be moving home soon. Anyway, I've been having some pretty vivid and interesting dreams of late! I'm going to go ahead and partially attribute the extreme stress caused by this year's torrent of bullshit to the intensity of these dreams. 

In spite of everything awful about this year, or maybe because of everything awful (things are perhaps tipping back in the opposite direction to restore balance?) I've noticed lately that I'm starting to feel more like myself again. The biggest catalyst for this specific change being getting canned from my job working as an assistant to a realtor. That job put the kibosh on who I naturally am. That woman and that working environment forced me to close off several avenues of my psyche in order to function in that world. I felt dead and dulled, I was bitter and resentful and it started to show. I know I became unpleasant to be around at work, partly on purpose, and I honestly should have left the job before I let myself turn like that. I was there for 7 and a half years. And now that I don't have that repressive environment surrounding me every day, I can focus my attention on things that come to me naturally. A huge part of my life and my creativity has always been my dreaming self. Finally, it's coming back and I blissfully go to bed every night, training my brain and preparing to enter the dream realm. I want my dreams to inspire more writing and visual art. I think it's high time I get those balls rolling again.

Stepping Cards

I was walking on a path made of playing cards. The cards lay face-down and when you stepped on one, it would turn over and reveal a very intricate drawing. There were cities and nature scenes. Some were people and others were more abstract. I picked one up to closer inspect the detail. It was a colored pencil illustration of a perfect circle turned into a very stylized little man seen from profile. He had large eyes, an open mouth with large teeth, black hair and brown skin. I brought the card closer to my face to really inspect the detail. It was incredible. The whole drawing was done in a cross hatch style, many colors laid over one another. It appeared to be completely three dimensional, as if you could reach through the netting of pencil marks, down and down into the surface. Olive green, burnt sienna, crimson, indigo blue.

Revisiting after almost 10 years...

I've been feeling, lately, as though my younger self might need some revisiting. I think I used to be more interested in things. I used to dress more fashionably, or at least look more interesting than I do now. I used to make more things. And I used to write down my dreams.

For many years in a row, I don't think I was recalling my dreams the way I used to. I stopped thinking about them, writing them down, caring about them...and I think that's why I wasn't recalling them. Lately I've been doing just that - thinking about them, caring about them; so I am starting to recall them and my dreams have become more vivid again. It certainly helps to do things like take a two week trip to Thailand! And actually, I think it was while I was in Thailand that I started to pay attention to my dreams again. They were more detailed, vivid and interesting, probably because they were being fed by a new place that was full of color and different scenes and happenings and people. My sleeping brain had a lot of new experiences to process. Lots of new and exciting material to work with.

Dreams are extremely influential sources of creativity if we pay attention to them. If for no other reason than to add interest to my days, I will keep paying my dreams the attention they require to fuel them up. Here's to a more exciting year and hopefully the rekindling of a lost life.

Recording with Art

For years now, I've been wanting to illustrate many of my dreams into drawings, paintings or sculptures. I just completed two such illustrations for my friends Krissy and Dennis. This will be an ongoing project that I can experiment with different styles and mediums. A difficult aspect to capture in a dream-inspired drawing or painting is the mood of the dream. I think that is what I base the success of the image upon. I think the three clowns dream is more accurate in mood than the library dream. But I am excited to have begun this series. Here are the very first!

I chose to paint this particular dream especially for my good friend Krissy. She and I had a distant and distracted phone conversation in the dream about her birthday (which is appropriate since I had the dream the night of her birthday.) The Staedler Fineliner markers I used for the outlines and the text, did not like the coating of modpodge I used to seal the painting (otherwise done in acrylic) and smeared a bit. Lesson learned.

This dream was recorded on January 23, 2004:

I was in the Woodbury Public Library, upstairs. I decided to try and look for maps and pictures and information on Lithuania. There were huge binders for every part of the world: Southeast Asia, Brazil, etc. I chose U.S.S.R assuming that since Lithuania was near Russia, it would be in there. It was not on any of the maps in the binder. All during this time, Krissy had called me and I was trying to talk to her and wish her a happy birthday. She was telling me that Alicia had sent her a big box full of strange, foreign foods. The conversation was getting distant as I was trying to research Lithuania. After a while I realized I didn't have the phone anymore. It just disappeared.

My first cat, Dusty, died while I was away at my first year in college. He was 16 years old and my mom had to put him to sleep because he had a mouth infection that would not heal and he couldn't eat or drink anymore. I had nightmares about him for quite a while after he died. I still have dreams about him to this day. I decided to finally post this today because I had a dream about him last night (he was completely infested with fleas and was very sick and I was in a panic, trying to save him.) This drawing was done in Prismacolor colored pencil and Staedler Fineline markers. I chose to draw it for Krissy's fiancée, and my new friend, Dennis.

I recorded this dream some time in 2000:

Mom was cooking dinner in the kitchen and Dad was sitting on the sofa watching TV. We somehow make Dusty come back to life and everything is fine until he morphs into a duck and starts eating a large amount of staples that were on the ground. I look up and hanging over the balcony are three small clowns with huge eyes, all singing a different song so it just sounds like noise. And I was trying to tell Mom that Dusty couldn't be a duck, he was my cat and I wanted him back. And Dad kept turning around and going, "SHHHH!" Mom told me that he was better as a duck because then he could live longer and wouldn't start to decompose and we wouldn't have to give him medication.

A story based on my most reoccurring dreams...

I have very often dreamt that I am a boy. The settings are always different, my age and race is always different, but my task is always the same. I am in charge of getting myself and sometimes others, out of harms way. Some invisible force is always lording over me and it means my hide if I can't escape. I started a story based on these boys that take over my dream self. There's a long way to go on it, and it's been tough to get past this point. But here are the beginnings...

Somehow, I always get trapped in these outfits of yesteryears. Linen pantaloons and open-necked silk shirts; tire-souled sandals and green camo khakis. I could be anywhere from three to sixteen years old and my skin is colored of the land I hail from. 17th century, 18th century, 1960s, the distant future of another dimension. I just always get trapped in an age, in an era, in a land. I get trapped in this sex. I’m always a boy, and I, I mean me, the real me, is a girl. And I can’t get back. It’s like I was dreaming so deeply, so long, and I finally woke up. But I can’t stop waking up. And waking up. And waking up. And waking up.

I can’t fall back asleep to find me…to be back inside me.

But these boys are so close to me, so close to being me. They’ve got something hidden away for me. Or from me. I can’t go back to me-the updated version- until I understand me everywhere and everywho else I’ve been and will be, and that there’s no difference between me all. If I am to get back to my familiar self, I need to start somewhere. A place, a solid memory of a real childhood. But this is easier said, easier written, than it is to find and be inside of. If nothing feels more real of these places than in my dreams, then I will use my dreams as the means to my end. Besides, if I can’t seem to escape them, I may as well make myself at home.

If there is to be a place to begin, I choose Brushy Hill Rd. House #94, the Gransky residence, where we find my friend Ashley and her mom who takes care of me when my mom and dad are absent.

The road beneath my scooter wheels is compact dirt. Rocks kicked up, dry, chalky mud-coated old rocks fly into my batman sneakers. I don’t care, I push with my right foot off the dusty packed dirt, over and over.

“This thing is so wobbly!” I cry out to the road so that maybe it will hear and be more forgiving in its uncertain surface. I can’t see anyone else when I look back. Did Ashley leave me outside to go get lunch or play duck hunt in her brother Seth’s room? I start to turn back to the road ahead, but the clumsy rubber of the scooter wheels catches on the rocks and we all skid out into the brush off the road-side. Had we time to assess the situation, I’m sure one of us, with our quick young reflexes, would risk all manner of bodily dishevelment and use our elbow, palm, knee, velcroed sneaker heel, to avoid reeling off the brush-covered cliff-edge into a sudden void spread out indefinitely before us. In the millisecond before skipping like a smooth stone over water into the oblivion below, something catches our attention. This cliff-edge is not dirt-packed like the road. It in fact gives a bit under our boyish weight and bows with a splintering sound as we’re pitched over, and the hollow thud of ply-wood beneath us startles our bones, as we have landed upon exactly such a surface: a rough, plywood platform.

Although these details have become clear in the second or three it all took to happen, a shift has occurred in the substance of the air and between our ears and behind our eyes. There is another long second of this shift, we’re held aloft in a thick black blankness before getting that familiar sensation of being tipped forward fast and we snap “awake” to keep from falling into a familiar, dreamy nothingness. Coming to, the wood beneath our body assures us some kind of physical reality, a point to start from.

As far as I can tell, this abysmal darkness below is infinitely deep. The platforms, as there are many in addition to mine, go on forever all around, above and below me. This is so familiar in a bad way. This is one step closer to my mind’s eye, where the worst things hide. But we’ve got solid surroundings, however unsteady they prove to be, so let’s take a look. I test the waters and sit up so I can lean forward on my hands and knees, four legs have always been better than two.

Write down your dreams

That's right. Jot em down quickly, write a whole narrative or even draw a picture. But don't let the good ones go.

A snippet I recall from last night's (maybe this morning's) dream:

06/25/2010

People are gathered on the beach to collect a bounty of burrowing sand creatures called Cock Fleas.

One thing that's so interesting about dreams is that you can either be so inside of the dream world that there's no question that things are real...Cock Fleas, without a doubt! Or you can be aware of your dreaming self (not necessarily lucidly, in that sometimes you don't think to actively change your whereabouts or goings-ons) and be amazed at the absurdities...Cock Fleas? Yeah, sure.

According to last night's dream, Cock Fleas have been around since the Cambrian period. Without a doubt!