Dreams and art: Dreams as the bedrock of art

Abstract

Skill can build a bridge to Heaven’s Gate, but Art alone unlocks it! This is not to downgrade skill, but to put it in its rightful place. Skill is one of the three pillars of art: Head, Hand and Heart. Yet more precisely, skill is a combination of the two pillars of Head and Hand. It’s not until an IDEA comes to the head that art begins, or more accurately, that the process of art makes itself apparent. But where do ideas come from? Not a question over which the artist generally loses any sleep. Yet occasionally he or she will acknowledge that it came in the middle of the night, which might lead us to surmise that it was spawned by a DREAM. It would certainly seem to be a most natural inference, especially since waking up at that time of the night with an idea that promised to catapult us into a fresh phase of creativity, could only have stemmed from a dream that was intimately bound up with what was in the head of the dreamer upon waking. My own research certainly confirms this and more. By this I mean that it isn’t just inspiration that’s dream-based, but life in general. Indeed, since life is transitory like a dream it must be seen as a form of dreaming and thus as comparatively illusive. What on the other hand is constant and real is consciousness. It is not only real and constant, but in fact the sine qua non of existence. Thus, being the ground of existence, it must also be the creative force that brings about the spectacle of the world; and since the artists are an intrinsic part of the world dream, they must be an intrinsic part of its creative impulse. In this light, artists are no longer independent creators of arbitrary works, but an interdependent channel of the creative impulse of consciousness. What is readily forgotten about this creative impulse is the fact that what it manifests is not a permanent entity, but like the dream, a transitory product. In other words, the emanations of consciousness are constantly reabsorbed into Absolute Consciousness, the matrix of existence. This process is intrinsic to the character of creativity whether it be that of the world dream or of the individual artist. In short, this innate principle of manifestation and reabsorption makes the work of the individual artists to a natural channel of reabsorption into the ground of existence with the result that not only the artists themselves are constantly drawn back to their origin, but also the ones that contemplate their work.