An Artist Looks at Dreams

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With the medical series, I served as a bridge between medicine and art. One medical student told me he could learn more from my drawings of the fetuses intake anatomy department showcases, than from the actual fetuses in plastic containers. I highlighted the distortions. So the ability to record a dream in art is a short cut to understanding the dream, as it makes visible for study in the dream’s original form, that is in pictures. It is an opportunity we do not have while dreaming, similar to the student not have the opportunity to ponder, rushing through medical school. Leonardo daVinci used this two stage method to study, as in drapery. He would make a tableau of cheese cloth and drenched it with plaster of Paris. When dry, he would draw it.

And in art, the stroke of the brush, the color and the relationship between two shapes and the distance between and among objects, close or apart, offer new ideas to the main theme. Feelings attached to the experience are coded into memory and they are together, fused with the same electric charge that was originally perceived. Many times, we forget an experience because the feelings are too painful to deal with at that time. So the two stage method desensitizes, slows down the process in order that we do not burn up from the heat of the fusion. It also offers distance and helps depersonalize by a miniature of the memory. Now we can view it from a longer range angle.

The brain illustrates feelings very well. We can understand how the brain processes and catalogues with various degrees of intensity that we experience the experience. For example, the sizes of figures viewed in a picture, are determined by the dreamer’s feelings for them as the dream is a metaphor. It can come from sound, color and smell as well as sight in one’s life. Something inn a day’s happening with attached feelings will become a dream subject, only with the exquisite parsimony of a poem. It abstracts and summarized. One small image can represent a whole paragraph of words. There is also economy in the selection of words. I say, "Shall I take a blind woman up in space?" But what I mean, is not sight, but insights, as space means freedom.

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Contents: The Art of May Lesser | An Artist Looks at Dreams
Preface
Preface page 1 - "I feel like I am being a traitor to..."
Preface page 2 - "I had left the ivory tower of the art..."
Preface page 3 - "Out of our private gropings and self..."
Preface page 4 - "In a dream, if there is a child held..."
Preface page 5 - "There is much in science that is..."
Preface page 6 - "The symbolic use of animals in..."
Preface page 7 - "With the medical series, I served as..."