silent partner

I am interested in the notion that often in dreams, people we know, act according to how we percieve they act in real life. For example, in a dream I wrote about earlier I was 'confessing' to a sister who does not judge me, then it corresponds in real life to be the sister that I can go to with any problem. We have spoke a lot about condensation, where many figures have been condensed into one figure in the dream. We recognise it as condensation, partly because the person is "not themselves" and so we say they are representing another figure, because their actions in the dream seem out of character.

Fred Tomaselli
Echo, Wow and Flutter, 2000
Leaves, pills, photocollage, acrylic and resin on woodpanel

The specific materials in the collage are decribed by the gallery as "jewel-like strands of actual prescription pills, real marijuana leaves, cut-out picture of birds, flowers, human hands, painted flames, and patterns of painted pills are arranged in an interlocking elliptical web that suggests sound waves and the orbits of the planets".
The image is busy, intense, colorful and has that transportive quality that Tomaselli is looking for "the idea of the transformative capacity of art".
This art work could be used by anyone exploring the affects of drugs / soberness on dreams.
Tomaselli is openly exploring the affect of drugs on perception and reality, in his art work.
The artist seems to be returning to theme here as he has a few paintings which have the words Echo, Wow and Flutter in the title. The words echo and flutter make me think of a human heart. These paintings also seem to capture the psychedelic mood of Tomaselli's work.

When you show up in someone else's dream, are you an imago, reflecting their perceptions of themselves onto you, a condensation of a few people they know, or do you appear as 'you' behaving "in character" - doing and saying things, even in a bizarre way, which still seem to fit in with your personality? Or does it just depend on the state of mind of the dreamer...
The person I am seeing told me he had a dream about me last night. In the dream he said he kept trying to meet me but although he did, there was always something 'in the way'. He was to meet me near my work but it was in a forest. Also in the dream I was telling him "here comes my boss" in a way which meant that would interfere with him spending time with me. He said we were also sitting at a picnic table and talking at one point. Then there were other scenario's in the dream where he was trying to meet me but there was always some problem, so we could never talk for long.

After reading Sonoma's entry about Mutual Dreaming it sparked me to write about this. Also some blogs are mentioning the affect of drugs and sobriety on dreaming. This was not a dream but more of a waking nightmare. I was on vacation in Amsterdam with a really good friend of mine. To cut a long story short let's say that our one adventure eating brownies at a coffee house started off fine, turned into hilarious but ended up going very pear shaped.

Wide Sargasso Sea may be a response to 'Jane Eyre' but it covers different political territory, namely imperialism and colonization. We see that gap between England and her colonies embodied in the opposite lives and ideas of Antoinette and Rochester. Perhaps their relationship is a metaphor for the imperialist's misunderstanding of the land and people they colonized. The result is that the colonized are cast as "other", demonized or called uncivilized, even crazy, which is how Antoinette is eventually seen by Rochester. But his presence and treatment of her is partly what drove her to become 'mad'.

Salvador Dali

We discussed in class the difficulty the artist has in depicting the dreamer and the dream in the same piece of art, especially when we were looking at Medieval art work.
It seems to me that Dali has really captured both the dreamer here, relaxed and asleep, with the contrast to the action and the bizarre nature of the dream which is happening inside the dreamer's head, all in the one painting.
On the 3d-dali.com website it says about this painting : "Dalí illustrates another of Freud’s discoveries. He said: '…a typical dream with a long theme, the consequence of a sudden accident that causes the awakening.' "

I dreamt I was staying in someone's home, like an aunt, and we were celebrating Christmas. Friends of mine were there but I am not sure who - all the people in the dream are vague.The friends and I got big gifts like mixing desks and we had to work out how much they cost. The reason was to do with paying the giver back. It was not too clear who the giver was. Sometimes it seemed like the house I grew up in. We kept having to move room so that the woman of the house (mother? aunt? - someone not from here) would not know we were calculating this. There was too much stuff - camcorders, music equipment etc. I said "we can share but we are not going to give them to someone else to take home". A boy from the neighborhood I grew up was also in the dream. Then there was something said that "Americans do this too much". I think that's a comment on the large gifts we received. Next we were guessing the price of each item - stopping and starting conversations to get a consensus on who thinks an item cost $100 or $150. The main idea was to get the right total. This frustrating process of trying to come up with the right cost of things repeated a few times until I woke up.

I find the whole concept fascinating as it is completely new to me. I thought a lucid dream was a more vivid and colorful one, not one where you actually know you are dreaming and can take control over the dream's events. It makes me want to try out the steps to dream lucidly.
I can understand that if someone is experiencing this and they seem to get an "answer" from the universe or whatever they see as "God", that they could really feel they had an actual spiritual connection in their dream. In LaBerge and Rheingold's book, they do make sure to state that just because you believe you had contact with another world does not prove you did. I think that it is obvious that someone who really believes in a personal fatherly God for example, would have a lucid dream featuring 'God' in that way. That is the image of God they would already have in their head. It is not surprising at all that this is true over 80% of the time. "Also, more than 80 percent of those who believed in an impersonal divinity experienced the Divine as something other than a person". I think this proves the power of people's beliefs and faith. None of this can be used to prove the existence of God. It is also true that Science has not managed to disprove God's existence either.