BEFORE

I've been reading Oliver Sacks's new book Musicophilia--the part on musical hallucinations. Many aren't psychotic OR based in the ear; they're confusion in the filters and pattern-recognizing circuits in the brain. Often, the cure's not rest or silence (they can worsen it!) but hard musical challenges, forcing a brainwide upgrade of your audio modules.

Then I read a long interview with Jim Woodring, the tormented, visionary cartoonist of Frank and The Book of Jim. He really does see crazy stuff, and draws what he sees... as I do with my dreams. Whether or not people believe us! They're the visual equivalent of the musical hallucinations Sacks describes: complex patterns, both creative and involuntary. But are they really hallucinations? Or perceptions of real patterns usually drowned by static in the busy, hasty modern mind?

THAT NIGHT

I meet a girl who's drawing a city skyline. Towers all round us. They climb til the tallest fade into a dense fog...

But I see them capped with Woodring objects! Ornate radial hallucinations--ribbed, gleaming, multicolored, lurid and dreamlike as diatoms. Up to 100 m across, they cap all the tallest buildings, at about the same level, as if the towers pierce a layer of fog that grows strange spores... But they're too big to be real. They'd bring the towers down.

"You see those too?" I ask.

"Oh, yeah," she says. Well! If they're hallucinations, they're shared.

"Gonna put them in your drawing or not?"

"I dunno yet. If I put them in, I look crazy. If I leave them out, what do I draw for tower-tops?" Good point. The Woodring splines hide the final spires--if the towers have any.

Could we be seeing a true interface between two realities? A material city so tall it pokes into a higher world of Woodring rules, floating like a fogbank? If so, and the fog lifts, the towers may now have no tops to draw.

The larger question: should art reflect your sensory world, with its beautiful idiosyncracies, distortions, delusions? Or is art about truth? At least, the truest layer of truth you can pierce...

What I infer, or what I see? And then I wake.

NOTES

• Cityscape: Oliver Sacks mentions an autistic English guy who draws cityscapes accurately from memory--catches whole cities in a glance.
• Fog layer beheads the towers: I live in San Francisco, where great towers often fade into our famous fog--even when it's quite clear at ground level. Different worlds at different heights.
• Capping objects: they looked just like Jim Woodring's cartoon-visions of floating radial spirit-organisms.
• Hallucinations? Sacks describes audio "hallucinations" that aren't exactly.
• Woodring Layer: I found an old tape of the musical Cats on my shelf. In it, the Heaviside Layer is kitty heaven, though it only takes in a few. But in my dream, the atmospheric layer named for physicist Oliver Heaviside become a literal heavy side--the towers seem so top-heavy I fear they'll fall. Not to mention spiritually heavy--in the hippie sense. Psychedelic!

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