Allow me to jump backwards in time. My last blog was about struggling to find a pathway within my Fine Art degree and fortunately I stayed on XD, which, as I understand it, puts more emphasis on the concept behind a work than the execution of work itself. Earlier this week we had a lecture called 'What Can Drawing Be?' which, for a non-drawing artist like myself, was liberating. We were shown that drawing can be as simple as a man pushing a block of ice across the street, leaving a temporary mark on the pavement, or as imaginative as a woman recalling her marriage through several illustrations depicting sex, sleeping, drinking, walking down the street, words woven into the narrative in the image.
Forward in time again. This article is entitled 'Patients Draw Near-Death Experiences.' There are 8 in this series. A short narrative and context is given, accompanied by a drawing by the person who has had the experience. The ages of these individuals varies from as young as infanthood, 6 years old, 20 years old, and adulthood. I sent the link to my boyfriend, who shares an interest in the paranormal, and he raised a very valid point: "I like the kids ones best, they're more believable." It's true. By about the age of ten you could have seen films, documentaries or even just engaged in conversations about these scarier matters and chosen to lie about it. My personal favourite of the series is a six year old who:
"Recalls an out-of-body experience where he fruitlessly swiped at his father with a phantom's arm and yelled at his older brother to play with him (his brother told his parents he could hear Scott's voice at the time of the accident). Then he says he was whisked down a dark ‘wind tunnel’ that took him to a monstrous mass of rotting flesh he calls the Devil. The Devil (at left, drawn by Scott shortly after the accident, and at right, redrawn five years later) accused him of being bad and threatened to keep him forever."
The accompanying drawings are simple, but they are honest and unfabricated and to the point. The stories require no Renaissance sketch to be viable and interesting.
When I first arrived in Halls I was having very vivid, fictitious and downright scary dreams. I would send a text immediately about the dream as I woke so as to remember it, and in one I wrote of a "fantasy world with evil religious undertones." I remember the dream - I had to fly over Halls selling tickets for a Freshers clubbing event, and landed in another world keen to speak to a shrouded religious woman who, upon arrival, told me she was done for the night and I had to leave.
One night I walked to a pub with some friends and told a painting student that I'd keep a dream diary for him in case he fancied making any Dali-esque dream paintings. Since then, I have had no dreams.
Tonight I joked that I had stopped dreaming because "the dream Gods know that I want to write about them, and they feel that I am making a mockery of them." Despite my previous blog on tarot I must state that on the whole, I am not superstitious, nor do I have any mad belief systems. I do, however, believe in the mind.
By now you might have noticed that this article has influenced my conversations for a lot of the evening. I asked my friends in the pub whether they had very vivid dreams as children and they both revealed recurring dreams which, to them, make little sense. A flatmate told me that she had the same dream as a child - that her mother left her in a pushchair in church. Another flatmate told me that she has had recurring dreams for a long time, and she feels that the dreams come as she tries to avoid them. She was so perplexed by this dream that she bought a book about dreams which suggested that dreams are due to "not actively handling issues in the active life," hence having to refer to these issues in less conscious states.
My boyfriend has been telling me about the same dream for the last seven months. He dreams of tsunamis.
Megan reveals a similar dream:
Now, I'm starting to feel a bit left out here. I have never had a recurring dream. They are equally as fucked up, but they come individually every time with their own lessons to teach. Often if I dream of a place I see it in my mind all day like a desktop background - every time my mind returns to an original and disengaged state I see a street or room I have been sat in the night before. That's all.
As a child I had this one dream which I still cannot make heads or tails of. My Glaswegian (it's a part of Scotland) mother read me a bedtime rhyme when I was younger. You may know it.
"Wee Willie Winkie rins through the toon,
Up stairs an' doon stairs in his nicht-gown,
Tirlin' at the window, crying at the lock,
"Are the weans in their bed, for it's now ten o'clock?""
For those of you who cannot understand Scottish speech (I bet you gave up on Trainspotting as well) it's about this character running around checking through windows and door-holes to see whether the kids are in bed on time. Personally I found it traumatic. Who wants some strange guy coming and looking at you when you're trying to catch some Zzz's? The pressure to perform to Wee Willie Winkie's early bedtime standards was unkind.
This dream I had must have taken place before the age of 5. In the dream I am in my bedroom before we moved to Dublin (when we returned my sister got the smallest room, on account of being at University) and I must have fallen out of bed as I am wrapped in my duvet, afraid on the floor. I had a crippling fear of the dark as a child and my parents would leave the door open and the landing light on for me, until they went to bed. As I stare towards the lit door a very tall man puts his head around the door and looks straight at me... and then he leaves. Now, I have asked my dad about this on a number of occasions as I have grown up. "Did you ever find me on the floor when I woke up in the morning?" and "Did you ever look right at me but leave me there?" The answer was no. Also, my dad isn't a particularly tall man, but I remember this individual crouching so as to get his head in the door frame. Maybe it's just a very vivid dream from a child with an overactive imagination, but very few memories from my childhood stick out this much.
Let's leave the dreaming stuff for a bit, but perhaps not entirely.
I have a very special gift of being able to fall asleep in public spaces. Yet when my mobile phone was stolen from my lap as I napped on the bus, I would probably rather have called it a curse. Despite my best efforts to remain conscious I tend to slip away on public transport, in lectures, and even (embarrassingly) on bar counters. In these places I have quite situational dreams.
The other week I was on a bus tour with fellow 'Starting at UAL' blogger Irina and managed to doze off despite the wind on the open deck. In my conscious state I had been irritated by the non-smoking signs, even though we were technically in an open space. When I had slipped out I dreamt that I was having a cigarette in the open, but gradually descended onto the underground and panicked about smoking down there. As I returned to consciousness I saw the head of the man in front and lingered in this fear that he would tell me off.
The other week I was on a bus tour with fellow 'Starting at UAL' blogger Irina and managed to doze off despite the wind on the open deck. In my conscious state I had been irritated by the non-smoking signs, even though we were technically in an open space. When I had slipped out I dreamt that I was having a cigarette in the open, but gradually descended onto the underground and panicked about smoking down there. As I returned to consciousness I saw the head of the man in front and lingered in this fear that he would tell me off.
Last Friday I had my first lecture. Despite Lewis' best efforts of nudging me every time my head drooped, I slipped into a dream state. I could hear the lecturer talking about an artist, but in my head he was showing us a lumpy jar of jelly. In this state I thought "God, how cool, a serious artist making jelly as her work." I may now have to pursue it as a concept, since the artist he was talking about did something far more mundane than jelly sculptures. Shame - I would have stayed awake for that.
By the walk home tonight I had realized I wanted to write this blog. A friend I was with at the time has a Freud book on dreams in their room, but they picked something up from reception and I was too desperate to write to wait for them. Fortunately I remembered a book entitled "50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need To Know" which has been on my shelf for about a month, and found the "Illusion and Reality" section. I am particularly interested by what they write about hallucinations.
Hallucination: "to dream" and "to be distraught," derived from the Latin 'alucinari' "to wander in mind."
And maybe more on that later.
Bored y'all enough for tonight.
Lack of structure King B.
