Old Art Again - And More About Dreams, Lucidity and Condensation Trails

Edit: It's been so long since I painted this small panel (in a larger work) that I'd kind of forgotten, but while uploading this photo of it I realized that my interest in condensation trails goes back many years (you may need to expand the image to see what I'm referring to here).


Anyway, here's how this post began originally:

The tiny screw that holds the right 'leg'/earpiece of my eyeglass frame in place keeps coming loose. I should go back to the optometrist's and have it fixed, but I keep putting it off. On a couple of occasions the screw came out entirely and I found my glasses suddenly sliding off my face as the earpiece became detached. Luckily, both times I was able to find the screw and fix my glasses, but next time I might not be so lucky, so these days I find myself tightening the screw every time I take my glasses off for any reason.

This morning I dreamt it happened again. In the dream I was sitting at a table when suddenly the earpiece fell off. I was, however, reasonably confident -- based on waking-life experience -- that I would find the screw; and sure enough, it was resting on the table at the far right corner. I picked it up and I was about to screw it back in, when I felt myself beginning to wake. I then became concerned that during the disorienting transition from sleeping to waking I would misplace the screw. That curious blend of dreaming and waking lasted only a moment, though, then I was fully awake.


I remember such in-between states of consciousness occurring a number of times in the past. I'm sure it's happened many more times that I've forgotten about. On one memorable occasion, I knew I was about to wake, but then Robert Kennedy of all people came to me and showed me a gadget of some kind, explaining that it was a gauge for measuring one's degree of wakefulness. I don't remember what the reading was, but it must have been high, because very soon after that I actually woke up.

In the original 'Nightmare On Elm Street' there is a scene in which the heroine, Nancy, is trying to fight off the villain Freddy Krueger in a dream. During the struggle Nancy snatches Krueger's hat off his head, then upon waking up finds the hat on her bed; she has brought it out of the dream.


Playing with the dichotomy of dreaming and waking is something that I find extremely intriguing, naturally. It's something that informs my artwork continuously as a kind of general backdrop, and frequently finds more or less literal expression in the 'dreamy' details. Below is a piece that combines my fascination with dreams -- one of the moths is painted and the other is a 3-D cutout; or alternatively, one is a dream while the other is waking/real -- with my interest in Buddhism (especially of the Tibetan variety, although that part isn't really stated in this piece). I find that the two mesh together well.