wondered if we are on the verge of an evolutionary leap forward, as novelist Henry Miller believed: “The art of dreaming awake will be in the power of every man one day.” I've reveled in eccentric characters like Gérard de Nerval, who walked his purple lobster in the Luxembourg Gardens to prolong his hypnagogic reveries. And I doff my hat to comedian Steven Wright who describes the uncanniness of life as well as any phenomenologist: “I fell asleep in a neighbor's satellite dish and my dreams were seen on televisions all over the world.”
With her trademark rhythms and rhymes, the glorious Emily Dickinson tells us that “revery” is an essential component in the creation of nature itself.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, and revery. The revery alone will do, if bees are few.
By extension, at the heart of our nature is the capacity for creativity, which likewise requires the self-luminous waking dream. It is in this state of spiritual readiness that creative souls sense the pull of destiny.
The history of art is crowded with creative people willing to do whatever it took to help them climb Jacob's Ladder—that age-old symbol of aspiration and revelation. For Marcel Proust, the taste of a simple cookie was enough to slingshot him back to childhood and then back to the present, a dream journey that inspired his epic novel In Search of Lost Time. Constantin Brâncuşi caressed woodcarvings he carried all the way from his homeland of Romania and read his native folk tales to reanimate his sculptures. In turn, English sculptress Barbara Hepworth visited Brâncu
Jacob's Dream (Le rêve de Jacob), Old Testament engraving.
Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden, Cornwall, England. Photograph by Phil Cousineau, 1980.
Since childhood, I've devised ways to slip into daydreams, knowing I couldn't afford to wait for inspiration to “strike.” On of my earliest memories is hearing my best friend's mother discourage him from taking me too seriously because I was nothing but a daydreamer. All my life, I've gazed off into space, irking my parents, teachers, and friends. I sit and stare, walk and gaze, and do everything I can to stretch my dreams out as long as possible—in a hot shower, in the morning with the paper, at the bakery, on newly cut grass, listening to the chatter of kids playing baseball. Whenever I get a spark, I do what I can to keep it alive, fanning the flames until they roar—writing it down, sketching it, singing it, learning it by heart, or talking it out with friends and family. I'm happy to say it's an ancient urge.
EXERCISE 1: First, dream the painting, then, paint the dream. Van Gogh's revelation to his brother about the role of reverie is a spark off the flint for your own work.
At random, pick a book off your bookshelf.
Open it and choose a line or two. Learn the words by heart or write them down on an index card.
Take those words “out for a walk,” as Paul Klee said about drawing. Write about them without thinking, as fast as you can, for two minutes. Surprise yourself.
Fold the paper or card and carry it with you for the rest of the day. Let the words lead you away into the land of reverie.
Do this every day until it's a habit.
FROM REVERIE TO CREATIVITY
When Navajo sculptor Nora Naranjo-Morse wants to make her beautiful clay vessels, she drives out to a riverbed her mother showed her when she was a child. “When I come here I'm excited, I'm like a child,” she says in Michael Apted's brilliant documentary film, Inspirations.
Nothing can hurt me. No one is going to say anything mean to me here. Everything is so peaceful, and beautiful, and perfect, so I just open up. That's exactly what we're supposed to do; that's exactly what I'm looking for when I'm going to create, that I'm opening up. I'm opening up to this force that I'm not afraid of and that I can just let myself fall into and be inspired. I think about the people I love, and think about the things around me so that when I go back to my home and my studio I carry this with me and I'm able to create and open up again and let it all flow into those vessels I'm making.
For Nora and many other indigenous people I've known, the “where” in question doesn't refer to a physical place as much as metaphysical one. Their focus and reverence is on the heightening of spiritual sensibilities, the celebration of the Great Mystery.
“It's all about reverie,” says Gregg Chadwick, a visionary oil painter from Southern California. He told me in a recent conversation that, “I need some kind of flight if I'm going to create on the canvas what I see in my head. To get that effect, I need to capture a kind of timelessness and leave the mystery of the world between memory and dream intact.”
Over the last decade, Chadwick's work has been inspired by his years crisscrossing Southeast Asia as the son of a career military officer. There, his eyes were opened to the intersecting paths of art, music, literature, and religion. His paintings of Buddhist monks and temples and the accelerating pace of life explore the ephemeral aspects of reality. His most profound challenge is offering his viewers an opportunity to be as transported as he is when he paints. “I have to get into a special mood to create the art and not just product. So I'm very careful about the music I play, what's hanging on the walls of my studio, the books stacked in the corner, what I've been eating that morning, even conversations with my son.” His work springs from a fierce soul-struggle, living proof that, if you want to be original, you have to learn to trust your reveries, your voice, your vision, and resist the temptation of style and fashion. Otherwise you'll never, as Bob Marley sang so thrillingly, “Satisfy your soul.”
“What if,” Coleridge wondered, “in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you woke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah! What then?” In the spring of 2002, P. J. Curtis, a Dublin DJ and music producer, told me a strange story in an old country pub in County Clare. His aunt had so many dreams in which she heard “fairy music” that she took to keeping a pencil tied to her bedpost so she could write down the music in the middle of the night. By the time she died, the wallpaper in her bedroom was festooned with musical notation from her dreams, some of which was eventually recorded by famed Irish groups like the Chieftains and the Dubliners.
Amazing grace, we might say. But the rational mind cries out: What's happening here? In Lifetide, biologist Lyall Watson attempts an explanation: “Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake did it visually, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Joyce managed it with words. They succeeded in diverting the stream of consciousness in ways that allowed dream imagery to survive in the harsh light of day . . . We do it every
