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!