Squidmek

After much reading on lucid dreaming--something I've never experienced--I took an morning nap, about 9:00. Before you laugh and say I'm lazy, I get up at 3:30 every morning, so come 8 or 9 I usually doze for fifteen or twenty minutes. I slept and imagined that I was about to take a nap. I then dreamed that I was in fact napping, on the floor for some reason, rather than on the couch where I was. I then began to dream lucidly--but only in the dreamed dream. I was in no way in control of the dream. Rather I was aware only after I awoke that I was dreaming of a dream, in which I had conscious control. Very odd. And makes me oh so much more curious about the whole concept.

I find the whole concept fascinating, and it's definitely beginning to inform my ideas for the paper. I wonder though, if lucid dreaming suggests a level of consciousness, of control, that would then suggest to me a relatively sane consciousness. One that is disciplined, self-aware, etc. In fact, LaBerge says that it does require a high level of training. But the dreams he presents as examples of lucid dreaming seem to be, at least to me, dreams by the average dreamer. People lucky enough to have been born with this capabilty. If that's the case, then one can easily imagine this type of inate dreaming capability in the hands (or maybe better, the mind) of an unstable personality, one that cannot distinguish between reality and dreaming. Especially forseeable given what we know about the intimate relationship between dreaming and insanity, as suggested by Hobson. And then imagine that this person is a gifted writer as well, has the ability to compose his thoughts, or more, can do so within his consciousness. Composing the story as he dreams it, and never quite knowing the difference. Does this sound far-fetched? I've been replaying it again and again, and it seems perfectly sound, if not likely, and would perhaps explain mystical texts that suggest both transcendence and composition, like the Book of Revelation.

http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/corrigan_5.html

Chris Ware is a mid-westerner best known for his Acme Novelty Library Collection, and Jimmy Corigan, Smartest Kid on Earth--both collections of his adult comics. I find his style both contemporary and filled with nostalgia. Although this particular example has no text, they often do. I've never been quite able to pin down what it is I enjoy so much about his work, aside from the fact that they're just beautifully and lovingly done. BUT I now have an idea--from Elaine Scarry--"successful image-making entails suppressing awareness of volition." Her suggestion that the "verbal arts continually move us about" sheds some real light on Ware. His work is practically defined by direction, as in, the artist directing the viewer. And his use of boxes, always defining a space in which the action happens, juxtaposed with other boxes--each, often, representing a similar image but in a different time--is not unlike Scarry's description of "sequencing and adding variations of images" to make an image more "vibrant, dnese, mobile." I like Ware because he tells me what to see, and I see it. I like being directed by him, it makes the experience of viewing more interactive, and so more enjoyable

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A full view of the Chris Ware piece.