Camille!

Not a stranger in the least to weirdly surreal and bizarre dreams, most of which have no direct ties to anyone I remotely know, my most recent was tamer than usual but exciting no less. The extent of the dream: Camille Pissarro sent me a text message. Idiot that I am, I didn't open the message for a long time, choosing instead to ride the powerful wave of self-importance in being the fortunate recipient of a text message from the illustrious French impressionist. By the time I finally decided to open the message I woke up, tangled in sheets, furious, to whooshing eyefuls of inflexible historico-reality: Pisarro is long since dead and cannot send text messages. What I wouldn't give to read that goddamn message, though. Not that I believe in any hidden codices in dreams or that it's the subconscious' way of directly addressing the conscious or any of that unfounded dream interpretation sophistry, but I think it'd be interesting to see what I'd imagined a text from Pissarro would say. 

Before my girlfriend left for Rome a few days ago, we were on the topic of dreams. She told me about a juicy little dream she had in which she was stuck in Louise Bourgeois' boudoir, the renowned, idiosyncratic recently deceased sculptor of whom my girlfriend is a massive admirer, and how the closet assumed this otherworldly, Narniaesque closet-of-infinite-proportions aspect, and how at the tail end of the dream Bourgeois kindly reached into her jungle of a closet and handed over a delicately bewitching orange blouse which belonged to her, and the tender, sweet moment of irreality that this was but also how damnably necessary it and other sleep-enshrined moments like this are, where our irresistibly tireless and unremitting imaginations conjure up these lucid, bleary moments where possibilities and impossibilities shatter against each other. Even her voice, as she was retelling me these details of the dream, rose to a heightened, honeyed, lost-in-joyousness quality which was so haltingly inspiring and gorgeous. 

Bourgeois' Arch of Hysteria 1993, Polished Bronze, Tate Modern

I say necessary because I sincerely believe dreams are necessary, vital aspects of human beings. Whether we remember them or not, I think we need them, as a form of gray matter Olympics, cerebral exercise, a refreshing dive into a deep sea of murky relations after which we might be just a little bit better off in acting out our day to day, perhaps boringly real lives. Enjambed to this, also interesting to me are the ways in which not only art but the artists themselves, their countenances, infiltrate our lives and run amok over our dreams and provide a strange betrothal between those two things, so often in ways of which we can't even be entirely aware; and then there's the inverse of this relationship, where and how art and artists are influenced and fueled by their dreams, both daydreams and nocturnal ones; how art (the best of it, at least) resides in this liminal category between dream and reality: something simultaneously strange and alien and familiar, just the way it has to be, perfectly normal. There's a whole dialogue going on there with, I think, the cumulative effect being the creative state, a limbic somewhere between abeyant dream and loosely controlled consciousness; the creative process we wind up with is this war-torn intercourse, and the work produced between these two things is this abandoned, six-limbed freak of a child that just seems to somehow make sense, which nobody wants for themselves but about which everybody wants to know more, and so we read, we view, we listen, we offer ourselves to whatever medium the art takes and, through it, seek to understand more of ourselves. 

I don't want to imagine a life without dreams. If we need water during the day to survive, then it's dreams we require at night to keep us alive. From them we wake up believing in the philosophy of More, which states: we are capable of so much more; we have yet to explore so very much; in our world we may still yet find new methods of thinking about and approaching our lives; there are more solutions that we haven't found than there are problems; we must never stop thinking, must never stop inventing the illogical; we are not finished, not even close.