T h e M y s
t i c A r t i s t
Creating From Dreams
(Excerpt from the book, The Mystic Artist by Sandy Frazier)
By Sandy Frazier
In the dream world, the
artist is offered a wealth of design, rhythm, colour and plasticity. Many great works have been created from
dream sources and dreamscapes. Experimentation in dream interpretation and
externalizing those internal visions is a wonderful way for the new student of
art to begin to unveil unconscious creations.
I've experimented with dreams for much of my life. The topics of my book were given to me in a
dream. I was inspired very much by
Maurice Maeterlinck who...
"...soon found that
there is an excellent and inexhaustible source of material to be found in
dreams. In them, he discovered a law of
nature offering truth and artistic creation to the seeker."
Maeterlinck had a habit of
waking in the middle of the night to write down his dreams, as I'm sure many a
mystic has practiced. He understood the
value of dreams - the wealth of vision and truth as endless and inexhaustible
as infinity.
We must value the art or
practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden
knowledge by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers,
unusual insight, intuitive perception... by means of dreams.
"I have a terrible
lucidity at moments, when nature is so glorious; in those days I am hardly
conscious of myself and the picture comes to me like in a dream," said
Vincent van Gogh, the great painter.
Dream analysis dates back to
the Egyptians and has always been an important practice in the lives of the
great creators. Sigmund Freud
considered dreams to be little clues on the "privileged route to an understanding
of processes of repression and to the rest of the psychic life... he called the dream 'the royal road to the unconscious.'" The power of the dream cannot be underestimated. The secrets of the dream reveal themselves
nightly to the mystic and from those dreams flow a treasure of wealth; for they
all contain a wish or a fantasy - like the Field
of Dreams wish. Dream-thoughts come
by day and play out in mind-movies at night.
Interpreting the meanings of these dream-pictures is an art in itself,
which takes great intuitive gifts, for dreams are like water reflections; they
sometimes become disfigured as if by the motion of rippling water. We must try to recognize the true picture
within the distortion. And the dreamer must interpret by association and memory.
The young Mary Shelley,
creator of Frankenstein, was inspired
by a recurrent dream she had about her deceased child. Her baby had only lived two weeks and after
its death, she was determined to somehow resurrect it. In a way, she did - through her art, through
the creation of the great story of a man giving life, birthing a new being with
the life force contained in electricity. The mysterious powers of electricity,
at the time, were considered magical... even a novelty. Shelley was haunted by the idea until she
breathed life into her great novel.
Sleepwalking headlong into
dream-scenes, landscapes of the mind, our visionary hallucinations may show us
a new reality. We become magical
realists, surrealists "encouraging our imaginations to romp among the absurd
allowing some colorful, extravagant, inappropriate element to invade the
flatness of ordinary life."
Federico Fellini's films are perfect examples of an artist creating
scenes that work like dreams "in which some random comment made during the
day can set off a resonant and haunting episode while one sleeps." He never dismissed dreams as mere fantasies;
instead he allowed the dreamscapes he created to cut to our very souls.
* * *
Art is about externalizing
internal patterns such as stored memorizations of times we once knew. To make the dream come true and show it as
great as it appeared in the artist's mind with all its charm, exciting
vagueness and mystery is a feat in itself.
"...with what real feeling, and anxiety, and suffering do we
experience joy, and sorrow and alarm in our dreams!"