Art and Dream

         Did someone ever say that art was a collective dreaming or is it just my dreamy mind ascribing collectivity to a personal conviction? If paradox is what brings art and dreaming together then the term collective dreaming fits perfectly the format of well-founded absurd. For how could the most private of human experiences be most publicly undergone? And, if possible, is the spectatorship of art the scene on which oneiric space introduces itself to the reality of wakefulness?
           For centuries Occidental thought has been probing the furthest corners of the mind in its quest to understand the cognitive reality of wakefulness, yet it has barely touched upon the dream world. The discourse of reason initiated in ancient Greece has increasingly neglected the fleeting sensations of the dream state to the point of eventually fully excluding them from the notion of reality. This strategy has been silently enforced by the Scientific Revolution that would turn the advent of human thought into a more and more thinly disguised discourse of rationality. In a world where empiricism asserted itself as the reigning approach to establishing reality, the immaterial, highly subjective, hence extremely relative world of dreaming could withstand no scrutiny. Oneiric reality would become one more item in the closet of a history of silences. It would resurface only as fiction, a metaphor, a symbol related to the wakeful mind. Only art, a veritable underdog of rational society, would dare to tackle publicly the question of dream as a fully scaled reality.
           In the very onset of scientific euphoria, psychology would pronounce the oneiric state as symptomatic for the mechanisms of un-consciousness and would diagnose the latter accordingly. Art would enthusiastically follow, redefining the oneiric in terms of its thematic implications. The dream world would swiftly be canonized as cognitively subsidiary to that of wakefulness.
           But what perspective does a certain culture adopt can affect the cultural visibility of a phenomenon, hardly its very existence. Whether dream is a subject of discourse or not, humans as we know them, still willingly or not devote an average third of their lives to the experience of its realm. Unlike the state of wakefulness where the individual participates in upholding a reality nominally determined by the group, the state of dreaming is a solitary exploration in a highly private world that belongs exclusively to the beholder. The ontological difference between those two realities makes them naturally shy away from each other to the point of defining themselves by the negation of the other, as the historic-linguistic exclusion of dreaming from the conception of ‘reality’ illustrates.
           To begin with, dream and wakefulness don’t occupy the same space/time. Wakefulness belongs to the linear time and the three-dimensional space of physicality where the material presence of phenomena, their physical embodiment so to speak, is the prime criterion for their real-ness. The realm of dreaming occupies an idiosyncratic time/space that defies physical laws and where the formal presence of phenomena becomes the prime argument for their existence. In other words, the world perceived by the onlooker during wakefulness is essentially material, hence solid and primarily physical in terms of its experiencing, while the world perceived in the state of dreaming is essentially formal, hence fluid and primarily mental in its experiencing. The former occupies an object-ive space/time that can be verified and shared by everybody, a collective space/time; the latter obeys the uncertain laws of a mental space/time that is objectively unverifiable and hermetic, an extremely private space/time. The mental geography (space mapping) and history (time mapping) constructed in oneiric reality are fully abstracted from physicality, hence from laws that govern the space/time experienced in wakefulness. Consequently, the cognitive approach to the two realities is qualitatively different and necessarily employs two distinct sensoria.
           One might argue that the concept of oneiric reality as occupying an exclusively mental space/time could be challenged by the nature of cultural production - a primarily mental activity that still belongs to the reality of wakefulness. While science and theory utilize a limited range of mental faculties (namely and most generally reason) in the service of studying phenomena of physical reality, the arts including literature could easily be described as veritable documents of the larger mental landscape. They provide the venues for translating mental processes and phenomena into physical terms. Respectively, they share a sensorium closely related to that of the dream state. This epistemological connection between art and dreaming is the narrow but inexhaustible subject of the present essay.
In my extensive yet highly private art practice, my dreaming and aesthetic body have merged to the point of empirically proving (to myself) the above. I shall hereby try to verify the validity of such a subjective conviction through the shareable tools of reason. And since dream is the hermetic personal domain described above, I shall be forced to use the experimental examples of my own subjective dreaming as the only source of bona fide empirical proof. I must admit, this methodological paradox gives me a sense of gleeful victory over the totalitarian logistics of rationality, a glee that far surpasses the fear of the challenges it entails.
Eloquence aside, it is in fact not art practice but rather art as mental documentation that can most clearly demonstrate the relationship between the aesthetic and the oneiric sensoria.
           Dream as a primarily mental reality is originally perceived by the two ‘mental’ senses, sight and hearing. Just as the newborn baby perceives physical reality primarily through the sense of touch, sight and hearing represent the major data channels through which the dreamer establishes, and studies the oneiric scene. One of the earliest dreams I remember having (somewhere at the age of three or four) was that of an elderly couple in a dark over-furnished room, trying to catch me and stab me to death. I would be unable to move and would invariably wake up out of fright. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in the Freudian connotations the dream might have entailed; I was simply horrified by the sensation of being the incapacitated spectator of a dramatic scene endangering my oneiric life. My dreaming reality was a convincing life-size spectacle that allowed me in only through the limitations of visual and auditory perceptions. I was forced to behave like the solitary member of an unwillingly but truly tamed audience.
           The audio-visual dream appears like a projection on the walls of an introverted space/time curved around the only spectator the performance is being run for. From here on, the parallel with the spectatorship of art becomes self-evident. From sitting in a darkened room with hundreds of people sharing into the spectatorship of an opera performance to sitting in the private company of a book, the work of art wraps itself around the viewer/reader demanding the full, ideally undivided, attention of the ‘mental’ senses. (Couldn’t we also call them the spectatorship senses?) The physical space/time of the piece becomes merely the scene that provides a comfortable springboard for plunging into the formal abstraction of the mental landscape offered by the artwork. However, physicality invariably pins the formal abstraction back to the object-ive reality of wakefulness thus legitimizing its permanent presence among the inventory of that reality. The artwork becomes by definition collectively approachable.
           The art practice entailed in the deliverance of the spectacle might have been a tedious process. Between the privately oneiric experience of conceiving the art work and that of publicly presenting a spectacle usually lies a temporal bridge of all too wakeful labour over the translation of the private to the public. This labour is what eventually turns the artist into a master of manipulating form, into a virtuoso.
           My partner and I are sitting in a café, talking leisurely about whatnot. He invariably asks me for a pen, takes a napkin with the café’s logo and starts absentmindedly drawing on it. As I go on babbling about the hidden mechanisms of the world manifested in the all too narrow topic of the conversation, my eyes are implacably drawn to the movements of his hand. A firm line curves out an unidentifiable shape that miraculously comes into semantic focus as he goes on outlining a foot. As if rooted in it, a whole human figure emerges in no consecutive order yet with a high definition and a breathtaking unexpectedness my eye has rarely experienced in freelance mundane observation. This shape becomes a universe, each curve suggesting the infinity stretching beyond it. I experience a mental leap. No longer my full wakeful self, I feel I’m standing at the edge of the conceivable world, gazing past the threshold of human capacity. If there is a friend along, both of us experience this as a collective leap. My partner brings us back to the conversation, takes another napkin and promptly turns our magic into his trivia.
           Witnessing virtuosity swiftly pushes the viewer into a state that engages his/her oneiric self. Artistic skill evokes, and even in a sense abides in, the oneiric space where everything is possible and the boundless logic of the spectacle evades the limited logic of physicality with an unbreakable conviction. Like in the drawings of my partner, a minor detail can instantly flash out an entire scene of overwhelming density. An extreme curve of the body or a prolonged leap in the air are all too natural in the dream space just as they are elegant and effortless in the movements of a ballerina. Virtuosity in wakefulness is commonplace in the oneiric space.
Yet why does not virtuosity alone contain the power to turn object-ive reality into a dream? It is not sufficient to repeat the age-old maxim that virtuosity on its own is mere craft - it revamps the question of where and how art does emerge. The unimaginable feats performed and witnessed in the dream state are symptomatic of oneiric reality, just as virtuosity is a feature, not an emblem, of art. The principles underlying the dreamscape and its spatio-temporal dynamics make possible the semantic realization of virtuosity. Abstracted from its natural scene, virtuosity becomes yet another extravagant illustration of optimum kinetic human ability. It is only through the translation of dreamscape principles, flashed into object-ive space/time through virtuosity, that the latter acquires a meaning bordering the impossible.
           When I depicted the café experience, I described the drawings of my partner as revealing an ‘an unexpectedness of formal combination’. With that near ‘slip of the pen’ I attempted to suggest there was more to mind-blowing virtuosity than the ability to recreate swiftly and faithfully already existing forms. Growing an entire world out of a seemingly insignificant detail is an inherent quality of the dreaming mind. In this sense, the detail is impregnated with all the significance it might have as the seed of that world. Freed from physicality, it obeys the oneiric logic that form and meaning coincide and provoke one another into an infinity of creative associations. This infinity is contained in the potential of the given form and suggested in the space beyond it. Thus the oneiric causality is essentially formal just as the causality of wakefulness is essentially physical *. From here to the principles of aesthetic space/time the distance is that of a coin flip or the blink of a waking eye.
           The artist who manages to find relationships between forms that over-jump the obstructing laws of physicality, toward a new type of semantically dense constructs (appearing as unexpected shortcuts to personal knowledge), has successfully plunged into the oneiric unknown - to grab a part of it and bring it to the cognizable realm of wakefulness. In other words, this artist has successfully conceived an artwork. But if that artist manages to flash out the concept into physicality with the oneiric precision of a virtuoso, then he has perpetuated an aesthetic realm. In simple terms, concept devoid of aesthetic consideration remains a theory.
This is not to say that works of surrealist format, for example, should be considered as ultimate aesthetic manifestations. On the contrary, their affinity to the oneiric theme and imagination might well be regarded as tautological. The surreal oneiric narrative serves to illustrate creative principles, thus making the logic of the aesthetic space comprehensible to the ‘reasonable’ mind. In a sense, it can be viewed as a cognitive linguistic threshold that supplies the public with the terminology and grammar needed for the reading of a semiotic text inscribed on the aesthetic space/time.
           I was once boarding a dream airplane heading in a particular direction. In the middle of the flight, I stood up turned back and started to go toward the tail of the plane to check for a friend who was occupying one of the back seats. As I turned around, the plane instantly changed course and the according direction of the seats. I was now heading to the front compartment. This alerted me that I was moving in a dreamscape but it did not affect the course of events - the plane did not land back where it had departed, as the logic of object-ive reality would have it. The space experienced in dreams obeys laws of mental efficiency, contextually supporting the focus of the dreamer’s attention. It is an elusive space that transforms or breaks down when unattended. To cast the fluidity of this space in concrete form as, for example, in a William de Kooning’s landscape means to be able to uphold and render visible the imperceptible gap between oneiric moments. Because, much like in film montage, the episodes of a dream follow each other so closely that the process of transition is only suggested in the cuts between the shots. The cuts represent time by eluding it.
           The instant succession of oneiric scenes can be triggered by the slightest digression of the mind’s eye. A diagonal movement of a hand of someone walking on the street can evoke the vision of a diagonal ceiling slope and thus instantly transport the dreamer into an interior located miles away from the street invoked in the original scene. Likewise, a diagonal posture of a man’s figure as seen from high angle is immediately followed by the diagonal shapes of guns in an exemplary sequence of Eisensteinian montage. Although this type of film editing is defined as discontinuous by the terminology of wakefulness, it follows a clear oneiric continuity where spatio-temporal relationships of sequence are determined by mental conviction rather than by physical possibility.
           Earlier in this essay I insisted on calling the oneiric reality primarily mental, thus making sure that the door to physicality remains slightly ajar. It is time to slip through that opening and check on the senses that have hitherto been sleeping dreamlessly.
           The recurrent nightmare of my childhood did not by any means instill in me the sense of a terrorized spectator. After many nights of stubborn training, I finally succeeded to realize I was dreaming, without instantly waking up at that thought. The couple was on its way to stab me when I abruptly turned around to face them, bravely declaring their oneiric nature and their respective incapacity to kill me. They immediately and permanently disappeared from my dream life. This was the first step I made toward cultivating my oneiric body. From then on, my dreamscapes would gradually acquire the depth, focus and tangibility of physical space. I would learn to traverse and experience them in continuous time, if necessity demanded.
           Developing the sensory capacities of the oneiric body is a process that closely resembles the process of cultivating the physical senses but with reverse order of priorities. While the young child initially learns through tactile experience (movement, touch) as, among other things, the perspective of children’s drawings reveals, the dreamer acquires oneiric knowledge primarily by visual experience. It takes a child years to cultivate a 3-D visual maturity capable of triggering the realization that there is something visually wrong in the pictorial use of ‘primitive’ descriptive perspective **. Even harder is the task of training one’s visual attention to the point of abstracting it from tactile knowledge and actually represent what the eye alone perceives. Likewise, it takes the dreamer long nights of discipline to learn to make tactile sense of the dreamscape and sustain tactile attention on the scene. The first light steps into a dreamscape feel like a flash of oneiric virtuosity just like the first realistic perspective drawings feel as if one is on the way to climb the artistic Olympus. In wakefulness, the cognitive process develops from experience to spectacle; in dream it goes the other way around, from spectacle to experience. By carving one into the other, art provides a reconciliation ground where a more or less holistic awareness of human nature and its capacities can take place.
           Once the first oneiric steps are timidly undertaken, the dreamer finds him/herself in Gary Hill’s installation work Dervish. No longer arrested by the images that run around on the surrounding screen of the introverted space/time, the dreamer/viewer is compelled by the object that has sustained his/her attention (or obstructed the view like Gary Hill’s central placement of a projection construction) to move around and explore perspectives on the visible. The dreamscape of the mobile dreamer is no longer a fleeting reality. Soon the visual screen stops backing up when approached and yields to the persistent march of the oneiric athlete. It breaks into a veritable 3-D experience. A most elaborate dreamscape can persist as long as one’s attention is trained to sustain every mark and detail of the scene. Once fully composed, the space is there to be traversed, explored or walked into without the fear of losing one’s way in the trial.
           Instead of throwing out the piles of casual drawings he had made in the course of time, one day my partner collected all depictions of heads (or promptly cut out those attached to any formal extensions) and composed them into a dense rectangle. Then he stuck them to a large canvas and plunged into the parallel reality of his painterly imagination to exhale what could only later be identified as a cross-cut of a human head in profile. Being drawn in various contexts and respective inner states, the drawings exhibited no other consistency but the oneiric logic of their exquisite form. He promptly gave the painting the title of Multiple Personality. Having witnessed for years his creative process and his sober yet unpredictable (even in its unpredictability) wakeful self, I wholeheartedly agreed with the title. I guess that was the self-portrait a painter sometimes ends up making. But more that that - it was an act of oneiric maturity. He had succeeded to compose and uphold the details of a dreamscape with the formal precision and semantic coherence of a highly advanced dreamer. Every element on the canvas could keep the eye immersed for hours into the intricacies of its miniature realm yet it would simultaneously refer to any other element itself representing a view as rich and unexpected. The eye would travel back and forth, far and close without ever losing its track in the labyrinth, without ever being deeply away from the whole or far away from the detail. And it would believe what it saw for no corner betrayed the reality it stood for and no line would leak out the reasonable uncertainty of a wakeful mind.
           But traveling in dream space/time usually invokes a mobile yet tongueless and noseless oneiric body. It is only too conceivable that in a reality of formal nature, the two senses that most exclusively pertain to qualities of material substance are to be the last to awake into dreaming. This is why the first dream in which I actually experienced taste was so shockingly convincing that I was led to believe I could have in fact brought the object of my gluttony along to the reality of wakefulness had I just been more insisting. It was a chocolate bar, for those who might be curious to know, and I was, like most, a child with a sweet tooth. Ever since I’ve rarely feasted in my dreams but I should mention, almost all my oneiric dishes have been unsurpassable. I suppose, physical experiences of that sort in dream are closely monitored by habits of the body hence they are rare and selective. Admittedly, even in wakefulness, I rarely use my sense of taste for purely cognitive purposes.
           It is however not the tasting alone but the context in which it takes place that intensifies the oneiric experience. When presented with the unique opportunity to explore the materiality of an oneiric object, the dreaming attention has to be sustained at a level of exclusive focus that respectively gives high fidelity to a taste that would otherwise be considered unimpressive in the data-noise contaminated reality of wakefulness. One might even go as far as to suspect that the oneiric body, having undergone prolonged periods of starvation, cannot but highly appreciate the rare occasions of oneiric food offerings. Much like in a religious ritual or a rare performance piece (which I have yet to attend), eating becomes a gesture of overwhelming importance. It takes place on the palette, not in the stomach, thus formulating a cognitive approach to the substance’s formal qualities ***. Such meditation can gradually acquire the significance of a veritable aesthetics of taste.
           In dream, I have rarely experienced smell independent of taste just like I have rarely experienced sound independent of conversation (or musical performance on the part of a visibly identifiable character). My memories of smell and sound freely lingering in the air around are disproportionately scarce. And this does not come as a surprise since an independent sound indicates unattended spatial activity just as an independent smell indicates the presence of an unattended physical substance. In the reality of wakefulness, they signal about something located at a certain distance and inform about the approximate position of their source. Since in oneiric space/time everything takes shape only within the sphere of the dreamer’s attention, objects can rarely achieve such high definition as to produce their own independent signals behind the dreamer’s back. On the other hand, a smell or a sound could trigger a visual response but, as already described, the dreaming attention is so hard to cultivate to the point of experiencing physical qualities that it can well remain unnoticed when those qualities are experienced on their own.
           However, there is one major cognitive alternative to the lack of signalization in the oneiric olfactory and auditory experience, allowing for out-of-immediate-sight spatial orientation. The capacity to directly sense, or know, without the medium of particular signals, is what I shall tentatively call the oneiric sense. It represents a basic cognitive tool available from the beginning of the oneiric life. The dreamer simply knows who is the dreamed person or what city or what house the particular scene is taking place in even if they don’t possess a single identifying quality. As the dreaming practice progresses, people and places grow closer to their prototypes; they can even achieve points of fine replication, yet the oneiric sense remains active in order to solve more complex cognitive problems. It warns about danger lurking around the house, about the location the dreamer is heading to, about the hidden agenda of a dream event or person. In short, it shifts from identification to divination.
           Constructing meaning in art is a fairly straightforward process as long as it has no aspiration to high aesthetic validity. What truly turns a formal construct into an artwork is the presence of a supra logic related to the oneiric sense (or now should I rather call it the aesthetic sense). The principles of the supra logical conviction that an artwork is more than a mere illustration of a concept are hidden in the elusive motifs of the aesthetic ‘how’. Commonly referred to as a mystified “je ne sais quoi” in art, or pinned by Roland Barthes as the third meaning, I shall simply call the sum of those supra logical principles artistic style (not including the commonly confused repetitive application of a manner). Manner is not style just as skill is not virtuosity. Style is the discreet capacity to manipulate form with semantic consistency. This consistency reflects an underlying dynamics of organically diffused form and content, with no excess of one over the other. But I digress.
           The subtly striking faces of supporting characters in a film, the discreet yet impeccable line of a leaf, the silent distance between sounds that makes them resonate with an overwhelming vividness – they all lure the mind into universes stretching beyond the immediate depiction. They refer to something that is not exactly there, or not there yet, or simply hiding behind the images and sounds. This something, which can be anything from a thematic layer to a revelation, is invariably what makes the artwork breathe with a life of its own, what convinces the viewer that he/she is looking through a window of an expandable universe. It engages the aesthetic sense into detecting and acknowledging that universe or whatever part of it is out there in the formally unspoken space/time.
To achieve this, the artist should not only posses the discerning taste, the sharp eye and the inquisitive mind of a master but an imagination that can abandon itself in the vastness behind the immediate cognizable. Only such an imagination can grasp and bring along with it a token from the abyss of silent knowledge and communicate it in no symbol to the only sense that understands silences.