POST # 182: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY

In a recent (and rare) clean-up mode, I came across a Dream Book I had kept several years ago. In it I wrote down a half dozen vivid dreams I somehow managed to remember. As my readers probably know, it is extremely difficult to remember dreams, probably because we’re not really supposed to remember them. Acquiring the skill (and keeping it) requires a great deal of effort and practice, but if you succeed, it’s well worth the trouble. Oddly enough, my Dream Book recently disappeared; I have searched everywhere, but it is gone. Perhaps having served its original psychological purpose, it has now become a dream. 

I’ve always been attracted to Surrealism. It’s one of the more interesting movements in 20^th century art, a subject I taught at the University of Connecticut for many years. The decades between World War I and II were veritable dream factories in Europe, and later, during the war, the movement was brought to the United States by an amazing group of expat artists, most notably Max Ernst and Dorotea Tanning.  My favorite artist of the period was Kurt Schwitters who left behind his masterpiece, the “Merzhaus,” an imaginative reconfiguration of a townhouse in Hamburg, Germany (although I don’t think he ever considered himself a Surrealist.) Spurred by psychoanalytic theory, Freud and Jung created a scientific basis for the interpretation of dreams. However, Hitler’s Third Reich did not prove to be hospitable to dreamers and most of the artists and psychoanalysts of the period ended up as refugees here or in England during World War II. Our gain; Europe’s loss.

My Dream Book provided me with lots of interesting images, only a few of which I was able to convert into art. The closest I ever got to succeeding were a series of quasi-surrealist paintings and drawings I did while recovering from a broken ankle in my daughter’s eleventh floor New York apartment with windows overlooking West End Avenue and the Hudson River. The magical views have shown up in dozens of paintings. Real, yet unreal? Surreal?

 A number of years ago, I decided to try to remember my dreams. For some reason, I was having incredibly imaginative ones at the time – ones I felt worth saving. I was previously never able to remember them but someone told me that if I go to bed telling myself that I must remember - and then write the dream down immediately after waking – usually first thing in the morning - I might be able to retain them. The technique apparently worked and, after a few weeks, I had a notebook filled with extremely vivid dreams. I tried turning them into paintings but they were too complex – with the exception of one that showed my late husband floating in the Bardo, a Buddhist term for the time between life and the afterlife. He had returned to tell me how happy he was, free from earthly cares and how his magnificent, athlete’s body, much to his delight, was now a spiritual one floating untethered and undamaged in space.

I recently went back to that dream painting and added a pair of 6’x4’ stretched canvas panels similar in color and technique. These recent works are not of the Bardo, but a curious mish-mash of pre-historic cave painting combined with Picasso, Chagall, Calder, cut-out dolls and Cubism. Now, how’s that for an artistic stew? Twenty-two years of teaching art history has come back to haunt me!