You and Me - Lyrics © Jon Crosby of VAST

Many apologies for my absence here. Dreaming takes a back seat in importance when you’re finding yourself in an inter-continental move once more.

Do you draw? Do you find the time to sketch? Paint?

I own several sketchbooks. Some of them are barely filled. Others are a mess of words, scribbles, and ideas.

My favorite sketch diary is small and green, and was purchased many years ago from Bookbinder’s Design in my home town of Melbourne. It’s a highly personal portable work space for me; not only does it contain imagery, but phone numbers, overheard quotes, tear stains, coffee stains, and secret codes. My green book is a seasoned traveler and her favorite vacation spot has been London, where she made two visits in the last five years to the TATE modern.

Have you noticed the people who take small diaries to galleries? Some of them sketch, some of them write down their interpretations of individual pieces ,and some simply write down the name and artist for future reference. If you’ve never brought paper and writing tools with the honest intention of using them to a gallery before, I highly recommend it. It’s not easy at first for some; there will invariably be strangers walking past and looking over your shoulder as you stand a meter away from an artwork, interacting with your page. I remember being terribly self-conscious about this at first, until I eventually realized that I was doing too good a thing for myself to stop. As galleries are public spaces it’s not reasonable to expect privacy. Mercifully, though, they tend to have nice benches/couches in front of some works.

Now that I live in Toronto, my green book will be introduced to new spaces, new couches, new stains, new marks.

I hope that you will all join me. Sketching is a wonderful hobby. Here is my most recent illustration, inspired by the music of Jon Crosby of VAST.

You and Me - Lyrics from VAST album 'You and Me' and several volumes of Jon Crosby's 'Generica' series.

If you haven’t heard any of the tracks, I recommend ‘It’s not you (It’s me)’. Heart-achingly good stuff. If you don’t require a box of tissues to listen to this, you probably aren’t human.

Happy sketching, lagoon swimmers.

Coughing Up

Coughing up the Daydreams,
there I see small   Bits
of   Spittle  and  Dust
from other Peoples
Expectations of me.
Now       I   keep   a
hankerchief handy
at  all  times.

Interminable loneliness of spirit is all that I have to look forward to.

Dire prediction, maybe, but that’s the solid star in the iron sky. Everything else has burned out, or worse, looks to be falling. The collision course with the end after a flight of fancy.

Some days I’d give anything just to feel nothing. If I could feel nothing, I’d never fear losing anything. And I’d have nothing to live for except the certainty of a sunset.

But what price would you pay, if you lost the ability to feel? Art? Love? Wonder? If it could be replaced somehow, would you care?

It must look as though I’ve been partaking of a lot of Absinthe lately. Not quite. But I will tell you of my latest dream.

I was sitting in my grandfather’s house, at the table we would play cards with. He and I were sitting with another gentleman, who didn’t appear to be anyone I knew. As we shuffled cards and smoked, we took breaks to go and shoot heroin in the bathroom. My grandfather flicked my arms with his giant, coarse fingers, trying to get my veins engorged. The third gentleman wished to share our needle, but I insisted on only sharing with granddad.

I remember feeling guilty but elated. I put a few dollars into my veins, just a smidge, and then continued smoking and laughing. I kept turning around, expecting my grandmother and mother to come in and start yelling at us. But every time I turned to granddad, I just felt like smiling again. His face was very clear in my dreams, its a face I can never forget, even years after his death, and with very few photographs of him. Looking at him always made me smile. One of the only men in my life who brought me a huge sense of calm. The rest of them ran/run the gamut from inducing laughter to inducing pain.

For clarification, I have never used drugs of this sort. What’s more interesting about this dream, to me, is the feelings of guilt and nervousness I’d hold until I turned back to the table to play cards with him.

I do miss him terribly, but they all have to go. Who do you miss?

Like most people, I have recurrent nightmares. Some I’ve had ever since I was a child, others are recent developments…

For the last year, I’ve had disturbing nightmares in which I mutilate my body. And yet I feel no pain, quite the opposite in fact. I often feel relieved and relaxed. The most disturbing imagery involves ‘castrating’ myself. I won’t go into the details of how a twenty-seven year old woman self-castrates in a dream, feel free to use your imagination if you absolutely must!

What’s disturbing isn’t the act itself but my feeling surrounding it. Why do I feel so bothered and frustrated until I cut myself apart? Why do I feel relieved to self-mutilate?

I don’t pay much attention to the ‘meaning’ of dreams, I think that books which attempt to alphabetize dreams and define their meanings are simply exploiting our curiosities for $$$. And it works, what’s not to be curious about when you dream about the most insane stuff?

But recurring dreams are of interest to me, there’s obviously a reason that my brain fires these images off in the throes of deep sleep. I just haven’t been able to communicate to her (brain) as to why. A friend of mine gave me some tips on lucid dreaming and on how to achieve the effect. He says that he can ‘control’ his dreams up to 90% of the time. I envy him a little, I’ve never been able to control much of my dream world. I can think of countless times in which I’ve tried to run and I’ve tangled myself up in the air, or attempt to shout and heard nothing come out of my throat.

In a way, though, maybe the magic would be lost if I could dictate it all? If all the tiny frustrations, frightening episodes, and complete mysteries were to be lost and replaced by a series of movies to be directed by me? Would dreaming ever be the same again?

Druid

What sleeps under beds of roses? Snails, loved ones, perhaps tiny little druids…

When I was a small girl my grandfather grew rose bushes. Not very impressive to most people reading this I am sure, but the climate and condition under which they grew made them quite impressive. Nutrient leached sandy soils on a beach front property, salt air, and a warm temperature: sometimes up to 40 degrees celcius in the summer. Not ideal for growing roses, and the bushes never grew higher than a metre.

My grandfather took pride in cultivating these roses against the odds. And when one was in full bloom, before the time of its expiry, he would pluck it from the bush, lift the petals off and eat them individually. I used to partake of this little ceremony sometimes. Roses are quite bitter and interesting to the taste, and given my grandfather’s preference for sweet foods such as tropical fruits that he also grew, I can’t imagine he ate them because he enjoyed the taste.

It does then make me wonder… why did he eat them?

…there was a girl. With a desire to write free-form, uninterrupted, with photoshop: the best darn writing tool she has.

And so this blog was born. A visual journey taken at a leisurely pace, a jaunt through dreams, a saunter through the subconscious. A dream lagoon.

I grew up by the seaside and close to many rivers, lakes, and lagoons. Fresh and salt water bathing felt to me to have restorative properties. I always thought that there was nothing a swim in the ocean couldn’t fix.

‘Diving in’ for the first time was not easy, however. At the age of three my mother and grandfather took me to the local public swimming pool. I was not yet able to swim unaided, and I had never been underwater. I cried when my mother and grandfather insisted that this was the day I would ‘dunk my head underwater’. Despite my protests, I learned to love it. The distorted and muffled sound, the sensation, the gravity loss.

And so here I am, again. Diving in. Dunking my head in the waters of the dream lagoon.