Dream Currents, dream art show at Stanford Coffeehouse, 1989.

I dreamed my co-worker 'Willow' went to see an art show composed of my dreams. That's not odd, since I really did open just such an exhibit today.

No, what's odd in my dream is her reaction.

She asks "Do you have realistic dreams, too?"

I say "Sure, I'm writing two dreams now about the people we work with at the library."

"No, I don't mean the content, I mean realistic--you know, coherent."

I always thought my dreams were pretty coherent (for a self-taught American, anyway), so I ask "What exactly do you mean by 'coherent'?"

"None of your dreams end up resolved. You just stop! I always dream a resolution to the plot, and in the dreams you mentioned in your show, you never seem to. So I wondered if they were a fair sample."

I'm at a loss. Never thought much about it. "I rarely dream all the way through till the plot's resolved; I stop when the issue the dream wants raised and stated becomes clear--the solution is left to me."

I nearly mention a book I'm reading, Harry Hunt's The Multiplicity of Dreams. Hunt thinks dreams are so hard to generalize about because dreamers have different purposes. He pictures the possibilities as being like a cornucopia, a funnel spreading up and out from the rudimentary type. Dreamwork's like climbing out of a gravity well--repression and amnesia narrow the possibilities at first, but the further you climb (no dreams, bad dreams, neurotic dreams, struggle dreams, breakthrough dreams) out of your programming, the wider dreaming gets.

Kind of like learning music--all that tedious drilling & training, and then when you get skilled enough to improvise, it opens up into a million possibilities. Or math--all those basic classes are cut and dried, but once you hit analytical geometry and calculus, it opens up...

In Hunt's system, Willow's dreams aren't better or worse than mine, we're just at psychological antipodes, far sides of the funnel: I want advice right now, and she wants stories with resolutions.

I nearly recommend the book to Willow, but it's so badly written--full of jargon! Hunt clearly wants academic respect, and dresses up a clear, simple, useful model in such gobbledygook...

I just summarize the ideas in it--we dream for diverse purposes.

Then I wake, and mutter "Oh, THAT'S what bothered me about that book." I hadn't quite realized.

I wonder if my dream was right about Willow's dreams. She's a supervisor, so I feel a bit shy about saying I dreamed about her, or asking her what her dreams are like.

And I wonder about others viewing my dream-art? Will they see my dreaming as malformed, just because their goals are different?

THE NEXT WEEK

Out of nowhere, 'Willow' comes up to me and asks to buy the most abstract, intellectual, and least storylike of all the paintings in my show...

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