International Association for the Study of Dreams 2004 Psiberdreaming Gallery

From a elevation, as from the roof of a tall building, I see an intersection of streets in a city. The scene is sepia-toned. A few buildings are intact but many have been razed with only broken foundation walls remaining. A man approaches the intersection from my left. He takes long strides, his arms swinging in great arcs. When he is about half way across the intersection the barrel of a rifle rises from below into my field of vision, the telescopic site comes up to my eye and I see the man in its cross hairs. There is a jerk, the man spasms and collapses and the rifle descends. I am sad looking at the dead man lying in the street and worried that I may have been the sniper who shot him. I see what I take to be the interior of a small apartment. The light comes from a single floor lamp and is very yellow. A small, balding man moves among overstuffed furniture, reading a letter which, by the envelope he still holds, I judge he has just opened. He wears the collar of his long-sleeved, white shirt buttoned though he is not wearing a tie. I see the same man in a tiny kitchen. Here too the light is very yellow. He puts a kettle on an old-fashioned, gas, four-burner stove. Finally it occurs to me that I am watching a movie. I am emerging from a mobile home, starting down a flight of wooden steps. Less than an arm’s length ahead of me, also descending the steps, is a man wearing a heavy, black overcoat and a bowler hat. Movement on his back attracts my attention. I see a football-sized mass of insects, so densely packed I can only make out their glistening legs, like a living tangle of wire, hanging from the man‘s otherwise immaculate coat. Suddenly I understand this movie to be about the bald man in the small apartment. When I see him, I am seeing his dreams. When I see from my own point of view I am seeing his waking world. I see the bald man sitting, hardly moving as he reads in one of the overstuffed armchairs in his yellow-lit apartment. I understand his waking life evolves in a place of horrible, random violence and irrational ugliness. He treasures and longs for his mundane, predictable, pacific dream world but suffers from insomnia. For a moment I feel his suffocating desperation as he tries to fall asleep. I am emerging from the same mobile home, going down the same wooden steps. As before ahead of me is the man in the bowler hat and overcoat. At first I think someone has hung a piece of roughly cut, raw meat on his back, then I see the “meat” has a pair of round eyes and a thin slit of a mouth. It seems to smile malevolently. Then I see another pair of eyes and a mouth below the first. Does this ugly thing have two faces? Or are a pair of these things mating on the man’s back?

02/03/04

#2392

DOG TOOTHED SHARK ATTACK

Swimming underwater I am impressed by the beautiful blue-green quality of the light but also am a little uneasy, feeling that it is getting dark here. Thinking to swim back to the surface I glance over my left shoulder and spot a large shark above me. Hoping it will not notice me I become still but it angles down and begins swimming toward me. Though I paddle my arms and legs vigorously I am not able to move in the water, which seems suddenly very thick. As the shark approaches it opens its mouth exposing large teeth which, surprisingly, are not shark-like so much as dog-like and which glow with a greenish light. I paddle desperately though I know I am going to be bitten.

02/03/04

#2393

SPIRIT ON THE TIDE

I am at a tropical resort situated high on a hill, looking down a large, concrete lined drainage ditch which runs straight downhill and out of my sight. From the top where I am standing to about fifty feet below me people are sitting scattered about the ditch, all facing downhill. Suddenly a large wave comes rushing up the ditch and the people jump up and run before it laughing. I understand this is caused by the incoming tide and is the reason the ditch has been built. At the top people begin to trip and fall over each other. A skinny boy with red, curly hair falls into a sexually suggestive posture on top of a plain girl with pigtails and glasses who has been sitting on the ground in front of me. Both laugh as the wave breaks over them. As the wave recedes I move among the revelers and feel another presence behind moving with me. Everyone’s attention is riveted on this presence which I recognize as masculine. The girls smile coyly, the boys stare with awe-struck admiration and it occurs to me that all these people are very ordinary looking -- none are “pretty” nor are any “ugly”, but all have some vaguely comic quality to their looks. As I move among them I am aware of the presence behind me silently asking each one, “What would you have?” Most of the girl’s responses are scattered and incomprehensible but I clearly hear the pig-tailed girl thinking, “I wish it was you who fell on me.” I glance at the red haired boy to see if he is hurt by this but he still is staring at the presence in slack-jawed wonder. I hear all the boys‘ more-or-less simultaneously thinking that they wish to be like “him” and have “his powers”.

02/26/04

#2410

A SHORT FALL INTO PRIMAL FEAR

I am in an open-sided shelter in a remote park. A grey stone wall, about three feet tall, surrounds the lower part of the shelter, above this four posts made of tree trunks support a wooden shingle roof. There are a surprising number of people in the shelter with me, all jostling and talking together. There are so many people I cannot separate or identify any one of them until a large teenage boy distinguishes himself by climbing onto the stone wall and stretching out on his side, facing into the shelter. A sudden burst of noise from the crowd causes the boy to start and fall backwards from the wall. It is only a short fall so I am not worried about him until I hear what I recognize as the scream of a mountain lion coming from the woods. I start toward the wall from which the boy fell when I hear a human shrieking in the distance and realize with horror that somewhere in the woods the boy is being devoured.

04/07/04

#2446

CRONE COSMETICS

I see a series of old ladies’ faces in extreme close-up, some so close I see only noses, cheeks and lips. Each one is applying make-up. A few are putting on light bases, but most are using too much make up and of too garish colors. I watch one in particular as she rubs a dark raspberry rouge on her cheek, carefully blending the edges of the color by dabbing at it with her fingertip.