Dreaming as a Job
I cannot remember what I wanted to be when I was five. Perhaps a demolition expert, since that was my father’s work at the time. At seventeen, after discovering the Surrealists, I began to think that sleeping might be a more attractive profession.
The photographs of Robert Desnos apparently asleep, André Breton’s Communicating Vessels, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams all fed the idea. Reading Breton even left me feeling that I could influence parts of my dreams. I wanted, somehow, to earn a living by dreaming. Unfortunately, I drew up no business plan and did very little to put it into practice. The dreams remained largely a night-time occupation.
Closer to Daydreaming Now
Now that filling the fridge and keeping the tax office happy no longer occupy quite so much of my attention, dreaming has room to return. After my previous post, I kept thinking about the moment of waking: that brief passage from “there”, the dream world, to “here”, what we call reality.
The passage is different when the smell of coffee draws us into the day than when a sudden noise interrupts it. Something of the dream remains, then loses its shape.
Dream imagery has a long history in painting. Giorgio de Chirico’s unsettling spaces, which helped inspire the Surrealists, are one point of reference for me.[1] At present, though, I am less interested in depicting a particular dream scene than in suggesting its disappearance. I want to find a way to paint the movement between states, even if it lasts only a moment.
I will leave the individual sheets largely without commentary. One reason for this blog has always been to let readers see a subject taking shape through the work. The friendly responses to those glimpses of the process mean a great deal to me. Thank you.
Extra: Remarks on Google & Co.
Being found through search engines has long mattered to me. Not everyone writes a blog for that reason, but I want people interested in these subjects to be able to find the work.
My original November 2023 post overstated what Google’s approach to AI meant. Google does not exclude content simply because AI was used to create it. Its published guidance distinguishes useful, original content from automation used primarily to manipulate search rankings.[2] AI assistance by itself guarantees neither visibility nor exclusion.
My own experience was more modest and more practical. I noticed that an early article about Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons was appearing in search results. That made me look again at its English, which contained mistakes and awkward turns of phrase. I used AI to help revise the wording, and later saw the number of views rise.
The screenshot records the all-time totals at that point: 944 views, 59 likes and four comments. It is a historical snapshot, not a current report or a measure of search traffic alone. The increase encouraged me, but it cannot tell me how much came from the language revisions, search visibility or other factors.
For me, that is a useful role for the tool: helping the writing become clearer while the experience, the pictures and the questions remain my own.
Footnotes
[1] MoMA discusses Giorgio de Chirico’s influence on the Surrealists. Its Éluard-Dausse collection guide also places Robert Desnos’s sleep-writing experiments in context.
[2] Google Search Central, Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content, 8 February 2023. This clarification replaces the original post’s blanket claims about Google and YouTube rejecting AI content.
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