I dream that cartoonist Al Capp, instead of drawing his comic strip "Li'l Abner" on into his bitter and reactionary old age, quit in the 1950s while he was still good, and switched to painting; he became quite a successful fine artist. Painted til he died. Subtle, disturbing work with intricate textures and restrained tones. Utterly unlike his comic strips; his politics changed too. Did painting mellow him?

Or is this all a Dadaist parody of Capp, Capp as he should have been?

I see paintings of his horses. The modeling is exaggerated--craggy, with raised seams. I'm turned on, they're so beautiful. Not so much their bodies but their faces somehow--their expressions are as readable as humans. A funny hybrid of painterly skills with cartooning's focus on expressing not light and color but emotions expressed.

I admit I don't much like the pale and rather pasty desert backgrounds--not my palette. But I love that horse.

Well, I love the head--the body's anatomy is sketchy.

Well, the face, since the neck and mane aren't that great.

Well, maybe that face is not so good after all...

NEXT MORNING

Rush off to work. My coworker Xanthe says "Check out this art, Chris!" and hand me a book on Southwestern art. I open it a random and see...

...a painting of a woman leading horses out of a lake or wide river. Nice composition, but a pasty fleshy palette I don't much like; and the horses are done in nearly exactly the style in my dream, with creases and modeling exaggerated.

Al Capp's horses. Well, the dream Al Capp. Who quit and painted...

A THIRD OF A CENTURY LATER

It's harder to prove a dream image is predictive or telepathic. Facts, names, warnings, those are easier to compare. But here the predictive elements were a palette and graphic style. Hard to quantify!

Unless of course I drew it at the time, and I didn't. I had SIX vivid dreams that night, and I had to bike off to work! It was an achievement just to jot down notes and, when I got home, to mark Dream 5 "p" for predictive and scrawl a mention of the artbook I saw at work.

'Kolchec' © 2000 by Sara Welponer

Kolchec, © 1978 by Al Davison

Even if I had drawn it, could I have captured that look? And I'd need to photograph the painting in the book to compare--and in 1988, pre-smartphone, photography took time, planning and money--for a dedicated camera, film and developing. Why would I take a camera to work? I wasn't aiming to document this to convince skeptics a generation later. And I didn't need to convince me. A decade or two earlier I was a skeptic, but by 1988 I'd recorded some 13,000 dreams, of which a good 500 seemed predictive, clairvoyant, or telepathic/shared, most of them clearly provable. Context and history matters.

My point for dreamworkers: a lack of documented corroboration of a psychic dream doesn't mean the dream wasn't. Documentation, for most of history, was hard (and standards change as it gets easier). Yet now and then such images do get recorded--and seeing is believing. For example, Al Davison and Sara Welponer, before they ever met, sketched their favorite dream-guide, and, rarer yet, happened to save those sketches--until they met and happened to compare notes. Now skeptics are forced to explain dated images by two strangers who drew and named the same unmistakable dream-figure: Kolchec. Such proof is rare because thoroughly documented dreams are rare, telling your dreams is rare, and good dream-artists are rare. But such dreams aren't!

So in your own dreamwork, don't dismiss apparently psychic visual images as mere after-the-fact rationalizing. Visual memory's no more unreliable than verbal or factual (admittedly a low bar for some folks!) Hits are just harder to prove to strangers.

This resembles Eugene Gendlin's concept of the "felt shift", the aha-feeling you get when you get what a dream element means; he urged dreamers to trust that more than some professional's authority. It's your experience, not theirs. Gendlin felt therapists often push dream-interpretations that don't have that "aha". You might call it the theory of the unfelt shift.

So trust your own good sense. There's one standard of evidence inside yourself, where you alone know what you saw; another for skeptics who only trust external documentation; and a third for true believers who ignore all evidence. Don't confuse them!

This dream fails Standard Two, because I didn't draw it instantly and photograph the painting in the book for comparison; but it was quite solid under Standard One--I felt that Gendlin click--I knew that image.

Standard Three? Please. Don't waste your time on idiots.

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