Fauna / Nature / Ruins / Zeitgeist / The Winfree Series
Commissions From the Beyond
In a lucid dream this tree fern modeled for me, changing poses with its fronds by my telepathic cue, while I memorized the poses to paint later. I cued the treefern to change its fronds into feathers. It began to do so, but just then some people entered the scene and the tree fern, protective its magical powers, ceased to mutate.
During insomnia an area of my mind churned for hours, then stayed awake and conscious (and so was able to observe) while another part fell asleep enough to begin dreaming. In there, flashes of light and colorful swirls coalesced into random representational forms. The forms dissipated into swirling colors and flashes, then formed again into other random objects such as a tree, a cat, a flower, and a chair.
A hole had been cut into my studio ceiling – a grave that opened to the top, as if I were underground. Freinds and family dropped earth and flowers into the grave, not seeming to notice the studio below.
On a road in a dream, escaping through the woods from a prison camp, I came upon this scene. Uphill among the trees women worked in sweatshops; downhill was the prison.
A dream may begin with small sparks of light which travel in short curves or swiggles. More curving lights appear, and travel in more complex curves, waves, crosses, and patterns. The light swirls interact, flowing through and past each other in large swaths of sparks, perhaps clumping together briefly into abstract forms, then dissipating and reconfiguring into more abstractions, perhaps attaining color. Soon fleeting random objects emerge from the light show, then dissolve back into their constituent swirls, then reform into other random objects. Next, the formed objects endure and may float along, morphing into other random objects. Then the forms begin to relate to each other contextually. Soon the forms and objects blend into whole scenes with backgrounds and details. The scenes then become sequential, and visual narratives endure.
The ability to see objects’ properties independently of their surroundings, such as finding the true horizon among a series of near-horizon contours, may be a function of the corpus callosum. This painting hung on a gallery wall in a dream.
I don’t remember the rest of the dream, just this scene before waking.
A study by Clayton Page Aldern and Gregg Colburn (Homelessness is a Housing Problem) revealed that high rates of homelessness are caused by shortages of affordable housing, not by mental illness, drug addiction, or poverty.
In this dream the water was amazingly clear.
I had brought several items and small animals back from Bolivia. Most of them rolled or scampered off into the landscape, then an egg remained and started to hatch. One each of many different bird species hovered as if emmissaries, to witness the new kind of bird.
In this dream the world was so crowded that many people had no space in which to move around. When the tide went out they moved around on the beach, went about their daily business, rested, and enjoyed that part of their lives. When the tide returned they moved uphill, back into the town, and again there was standing room only.
An aquarium caretaker was refilling the tank and forgot, or didn’t care, that he had already added (salt) to the water, and added some more. The fish, sensing that they were now poisoned and doomed, began to indiscriminately eat each other whole. Some were eating fish so large that they died in the process. I reached in and poked the back of a large pudgy fish, so it regurgitated another fish it had nearly swallowed. One small fish was hiding in a crevice under a rock, knowing it would soon die of contaminated water, or be eaten. I added fresh water to the tank to dilute the poison, though seemingly too late.
