Fellow dream-artist Jenny Badger Sultan taught me this old surrealist exercise. Here's her formula: get some odd veggies--limp ones are fine, but ketchup (despite Ronald Reagan) should not be treated as a vegetable unless you're SERIOUSLY into goth. Close your eyes, dump the veggies on a big piece of paper a few times, till you get an intriguing composition. Now draw their silhouettes. Then... don't draw THEM, draw EVERYTHING ELSE. What do those strange-shaped spaces turn into? What do they say?

Here was my first try, playing mostly with texture.

The exercise tranced me out. I sank into the textures (click on image to see close-up) but afterward I realized... I'd been censoring/suppressing faces and figures and images that wanted to creep in.

So I tried a second one. No censoring. Let the creatures come. And they did!

• Feral Cat Me, hiding in a tree, refusing to come down into the human world.
• Sad Me, curled up, refusing to move.
• Robed mystic girls following strange visions. Me doing dreamwork?
• A whole dream city where I found myself waiting for a trolley, covertly gawking at my fellow dream-commuters on the platform.
• A sexy scuba girl exploring the dream-depths... is that dolphin her lover? Wait, I met them in a dream long ago--oh! The Kennerbird...
• My anima, a talking mare named Silky.
• And the migrant bird my soul turns into when I dream... Or when I just quit censoring!

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites