Exposing Consciousness ~ Expanding Subconsciousness ~ Entering the Unconscious
Primarily a writing exercise, this dream journal-inspired blog is a quiet introspective sojourn into the process that we traverse in going from private dream to public art. I see our dreaming as an internalized mythmaking. As I philosophize and expressively exhibit dreams, both private and public, I encourage and delight in creative language as a way to practice experiential metaphors through a “public dreaming." Writing Theory: Creative Dream Fiction
Representing a shaman holding two sceptres, wearing a large nasal ornament and a high headgear with two toucans.
Lost-wax cast gold with false filigree decoration, 10th-15th century, Colombia. Artist Unknown.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)
"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive."
Plains Cree Man from "The Plains Cree: an ethnographic, historical and comparative study" by David G. Mandelbaum
"And in the end then it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?
Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted to this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities.
And it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600,000 years, the neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy, specialization, surplus is only ten thousand years ago, the modern industrial world as we know it is barely three hundred years old. Now that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millenia.
When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it is within that song that we all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples in all gardens find a way to flourish."
from Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures, a TED talk ( http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html#.Tswyaa16evc.facebook )
While submerged in moments dreaming, through the night, past dawn without heed to sleep, my wife pieces together a spellbinding gorgeous array of color and texture through rhythmic sound, composed with originality sparked by intuitive improvised sense awareness on midi keyboard, blank canvas of creative recognition in tune with her virtuostic Zheng spectacle woven seamlessly within the elementary modern electronica and Asiatic-influenced sonic currents streaming through her own resonance in ancient to modern forms of music.
Bask in the brilliance of "Extinct" Vi An's follow-up electronic album after "Endangered"
The first time I entered the Chauvet cave, I had a chance to get in during five days, and it was so powerful that every night I was dreaming of lions and every day it was the same shock for me, it was an emotional shock, I mean, I am a scientist, but a human too, and after five days I decided not to go back into the cave because I needed time just to relax and take time to...
Herzog
To absorb it?
French Archaeologist
To absorb it.
Herzog
And you dreamt not of paintings of lions but of real lions?
Herzog
Of both. Of both definitely.
Herzog
Were you afraid in your dreams?
French Archaeologist
No, I was not afraid. I was not afraid, it was more a feeling of powerful things and deep things, a way to understand things which is not a direct way.
To Canada! Without place or concrete plan to find one, he begins with the simple purchase of a vehicle, to roam the entirety of this vast nation without foresight or reckoning with fate.
First night in Montreal, a dream;
An Aboriginal elder, playing his frame drum in the dream fog of a striking, celestial presence, tells him repeatedly "...this is the land of the Buffalo." He repeats, "Respect this, the land of the Buffalo."
Out of all destinations, traveling throughout the country, without ever having even known anything about Canada, he arrives in Calgary to live. Calgary is an auspicious place with respect to the Buffalo. The traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes Calgary and the surrounding region, bespeak a plains culture which has honored the Buffalo like none other. The last herds still roam in the northernmost regions of this province.
He goes on to talk about his travails as a boy of only 10 years when the Iranian revolution began. He tells of how he was forced to read in the dim light of a locked vault; a tunnel wherein subversive books were protected by his family. Therein he caused such foment in his mind that would have never been possible in the veiled reality of the Shah's theocratic mental confinements. So, as a true seeker, artist, visionary and dreamer within his growing heart, cultivated by the creation of literary might found in the truth of so many ingenious ghosts unveiled by sanctimonious literary iconoclasm. He remained trapped as it were, underground, with thoughts hailed as mystery in the whisper of a clouded heart.
Yet, his traumatic devotion to the tunnel-enclosed vault gave seed within the dank depths of his early budding mind. With practiced devotion he went to the darkest places in the world, hidden under inhumane truths silenced by war, poverty, corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship. In Canada, specifically in Calgary, he was led to the traditional womb of our Mother Earth among the plains Buffalo culture. Led, as it were, unaware, under the inverted belly of the Buffalo. The hide blanket of the Sweat draped over his unknowing spirit and found in him a place where to confront his mental wound, to rise from that vaulted literary wisdom, and see an inner light reflecting from within his own self as the sensory magic of spiritual knowledge. Upon exiting from the womb, blinded, suffocated, and nearly maimed with the burn of volcanic rocks aflame, his healing journey had commenced, and the vault of his childhood swung wide in the clear open before him as never before as he entered a newfound paradigm of artistic awakening through the dream of a music-theatre production with us all.
As a man who has experienced Sufi tradition in the mountains of Kurdistan, the poetry of my new friend has proclaimed a clear vision directed to all who may listen. In his voice is a uniqueness, an artistic dreaming forged by a soul strengthened and clarified within the tight impasse of as yet unraveled knots of complex human suffering. His voice reminds us of places beset with burdens so immense as to drown many a human heart in endless sorrow. Still, in his voice is a passion enduring with deft creativity and boundless truth-seeking that is infectious and empathetic in its wisdom. He now seeks shared visionary exploration, a lyrical orchestration towards a lasting expression of a public dreaming.
His story was shared in the name of the passing artist and Sufi healer through the music of Sayed Khalil Alinejad; who was recently killed by the still repressive government in Iran. His murder is an outcry of world shame, an example of absolute heresy against the human spirit by the glowing red eye of a deeply traumatized society, living earnestly, without repose in the recesses of a hellbound subconscious blur. This honest-hearted musician and spiritually expressive man was told before the incident by a fellow Sufi that he would burn in hell, a few weeks later, he was burned in his home with his son. To a person of spirit, we have to wonder, how in life he spoke through music, and how Death became the last tone vibrating through the soul of his forever respectful listeners.
It is said that the character of the American Buffalo, unlike all the other animals and creatures of the North American plains, would charge headlong into an oncoming blizzard, while all others will flee. The American Buffalo will find its way through the worst of storms, earnestly engaged in the collective healing met between the spirit of the storm and the spirit of its own animal nature. With the strength of the Buffalo, he passes through to the bounty of a naked Earth on the other side. We have to wonder if people like Sayed Khalil Alinejad have tasted an ardour similar to that of the American Buffalo, braving the worst of storms, and have become as a message of this near-vanquished Spirit to the people of the Earth and Sky.
Passage of the Iron Gates in Algeria, 18. October 1839 by Adrien Dauzats
Dream Memory 1
I see a map attached to what looks like a conference board display in a war room of sorts. The map has impressions which remind me of old wood stamp envelope seals, however they are marked in a fashion as to resemble blood forced into an array of impassioned fervor, an explosion of red paint or wax fixed on deliberate points on the map. I see the largest impression, which my eyes are drawn to first, is on Indonesia, next on Southeast Asia, there is an very large impression on Chile, on Japan, on Turkey, and then I realize these imprints represent shockwaves and their traces of carnage. Earthquakes and tsunamis are scaled with an imprint of blood on the map. I look closely at the geographic place where I am, in North America, and I see small traces of red. Is this a forecast I wonder?
Dream Memory 2
I am walking through a densely wooded road with my cousins and family friends. We find our way to a cliffside. One of my older cousins, about my age, decides to be risky. He begins walking alongside the cliff very close. I try to one up him, and so I slink on down the side of the cliff, letting myself hang on an overhanging root. I become quite frightened by the implausibility of survival if I were to slip and fall from such heights. My cousin then does me in by lowering himself to a rocky outcrop far beneath our feet at the cliff's edge. I am frightened for him. I can feel his vertigo. Then he falls. It is as if I fall with him. We all act as if he is now dead. After some time passes, I am a presence, with him, though he can not see me. He is lying on his side at the bottom of the cliff. A black man finds him. This man seems to resemble more of an African character than American. Soon, however, we are in what appears to be a gang-ridden neighborhood in Southern California. There is great risk, as people surround us with guns. The rest is clouded.
Dream Memory 3
I am in a Chinese grocery store. It reminds me somehow of the city of Vancouver. I find to my great delight a whole bunch of good items to purchase, however I don't leave the shop for two days. I am in their rummaging through all of the items, without much sense of purpose, and suddenly as I am working on the tile floor, trying to fix it, the owner of the shop points me out. She takes my to go box of orders and begins throwing them out, telling me they have gone bad. I plead with her while each piece of delicious food is bit into, prodded and thrown into the trash. She then kicks me out.
"Near-quotations from The Ego and Its Own dot the Guntram libretto. Stirner criticizes the "beautiful dream" of the liberal idea of humanity; Guntramemploys that same phrase and contemptuously adds, "Dream on, good people, about the salvation of humanity."
