An Interview with Wayan
From Chris Wayan's journal, 1994/3/20
In spring 1994, dream researcher Stephanie Van Zandt Nelson held a dreamwork class in San Francisco. I guest-lectured on dream art. As a warmup, Stephanie asked about my dream-process...
It was analogous to sexual latency, the way most kids learn gender roles by five or so, but then put the whole can of worms aside for about five years and learn how to read and tie their shoes first. Or don't. I'm still weak on shoes.
When I started to write dreams down in high school, and face the forbidden urges in them--sex, flying, transforming into animals, sending my spirit to other worlds-- the conflict between day- and dream-values stopped being latent. They fought. Took years to let the dream-me out, and I'm still struggling with it.
Besides quantity, there's quality. Great dreams are not just for some elite few Carlos Castaneda initiates! Powerful dreaming may be a somewhat innate gift, but so is being a musical prodigy. That doesn't mean you can't learn to sing, read music, play an instrument. But this society likes superstars and ignores anything less...
Hmmm, environment. I'm a native Californian, my family's been here 70 years. That may be significant; California cultures did encourage dreams and I believe the land does talk to us. California tribes valued dreams (Theodora Kroeber, who should know, said "the Mojave are the only people who dreamed their entire literary corpus") and I feel great affinity with their stories. A sharp sense of place, growing from the microclimates so crucial here; quakes and the concern for balance that's almost Greek; an empathy with animals that's even stronger than in the rest of North America; a sense of California as an ecological island, a world unto itself; the biggest and oldest trees being here--do their spirits have an influence? It's so different from Plains spirituality and dreamwork--their stark, toughminded vision, and zany humor. Or the East Coast peoples with their rhetoric, snow, and political federations...
The comics and picture-poems and dream-paintings I'm showing here today were mostly done on computer, because I don't visualize things clearly till I've sketched it many times. That tentative process is much faster on the computer. Plus you can hit UNDO... It certainly isn't a preference for a "computer" look. I just haven't mastered painting or ink yet, not to the point they can express what my dreams want to say. I may get to that point, and if so, my art may well shift away from the computer. If the dreams want me to. Conveying their message, not establishing some "signature" medium or style, is the point, after all.
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