dreamtellers

a couple of works related to dreams

Another topic to fill a library with 😊 But first I would like to apologize that due to a technical problem (aksimet) last week some comments unexpectedly ended up in the spam folder. All should be fine again.

Early Dreaming

Dreams have fascinated me since I was a teenager. Of course, living in Sigmund Freud’s hometown, his works [1] had a certain influence on me. But the Surrealists really turned my world around, and it first was André Breton who opened the door to this world for me. Then came the painters like Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico etc.

What I definitely learned from Breton and Desnos is that you can learn to dream, that you can cultivate dreaming and, above all, control it to some extent. [2]

Collages by the Surrealists therefore were some of my earliest works. However, I then continued to work on them with pen and ink and wanted to create scenarios that were as “real” as possible. Which wasn’t really what the surrealists had in mind.

Despite my unlimited enthusiasm, I was never completely satisfied with the representations of the dreams I came across as they are more like “photos of a dream sequence”, static snapshots. Or certain objects were placed in relation to one another, which evoked the illusion of a dream.

In my last post, I touched on the differences in perception in different cultures [post: how we see] and have been asking myself the question for some time: “If we perceive physical objects such as paintings or sculptures differently, do we then also dream differently”? From my point of view for sure. So I started playing around a bit and here is the result.

trying sequences of dreams

dusk

I’m sure many of you know this: it’s only late afternoon, you feel a bit exhausted and you want to relax a little on the couch. You don’t want to sleep, too early for that, but as soon as you close your eyes, “fragments of dreams” run in front of your inner eye, trying to lure us into the land of dreams.
At first I had something along the lines of Goethe in mind, maybe you know this verse from his poem “Erlkönig” [3]

‘Won’t you come with me, my fine lad?

My daughters shall wait upon you;

my daughters lead the nightly dance,

and will rock you, and dance, and sing you to sleep.’

But then I would run the risk of female viewers complaining that no handsome guys were portrayed 😊
Be that as it may, the first sheet should reflect this phase.

Another attempt to catch the first phase of slipping into the dream world is as follows.

It’s less about whether these are great works and more about a game with thoughts like how can you depict certain features of dreams generally? For me dreams very often have a strong emotional component. Something I miss in most images dealing with dreams.

night

On another sheet I tried to be less concrete and to abstract “dream events”. Sometimes when we wake up we know we had a very intense dream about something, but we can’t remember anything. Only the indefinable feeling accompanies us until we have drunk our morning coffee.

dawn

This picture will probably not survive. I either revise it or start over. I still want to show it because it has a funny thought behind it. Actually, I wanted to dream “Chinese”. But “The Chinese Dream” is already occupied by the Chinese government. (Yes, of course it’s a more or less 1:1 copy of “The American Dream“. So I dreamed a Japanese Dream.

If I continue to work on this sheet, I have to be careful not to lose the fine Japanese accent or to make it too obvious.

More of my surrealist works

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footnotes:

[1] Especially his book: The Interpretation of Dreams from 1899

[2] Most of all Breton’s “Les vases communicants” 1932

[3] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Der Erlkönig. Full Text in English