PINNACLES

My husband Hank and I are climbing down fingers of rock or pinnacles. The climbing is difficult: they are very slender and seem to branch out as we descend, so you must choose paths. I think I have done this before but am having more trouble this time. Can't see footholds, and I just can't seem to find a way down. I wait to see how Hank goes, and follow his lead.

A strange man is climbing down too. He points out a few piles of human excrement on the rocks and says "People should have found a better way to dispose of their shit."

There is a fire out here that is burning, raging. It is a danger. Back at a house, someone gives me a staff of white wood and tells me "If you plunge it in the fire, it will put the fire out." So I return to the fire and thrust the staff in. It's strange--a dense fire of wood and/or stone--very dense. When I thrust the rod in, a little piece is left in my hand, four or five inches long. I figure it may not work if it doesn't all go in, so I force this last piece into the flame. I don't see the fire stopping, but I know it will. Hank and I are both working toward the same end, but we are apart: I have quelled this fire on my own.

MANDALA OF THE HOUSE OF SULTAN

A gathering in a house. People are describing the miraculous journey of Hank's painting "Mandala of the House of Sultan"--how in a few years it travelled from this person to that, from this place to that. It was seen as a very important, seminal painting with special properties.

This is a celebration of it. Someone comments, "And it only cost a quarter of a ____" (some amount I'm not sure of). Tiny needlepoint books are handed out, documenting the journey of the painting. There is a sense that the museum has done wrong in ignoring important works like this.

SILHOUETTES

Now I'm on a beach with a small group of people. I notice that in the back of my dream book (not one I recognized when I woke) I have a pack of black construction paper. I say gaily, "Now I can cut out silhouette portraits of each of you." I am only kidding.

I wake to the sound of heavy rain around 5 A.M.

--Jenny Badger Sultan

EDITOR'S NOTES

• Let's summarize the first two dream scenes as "a long tricky half-blind climb down a cliff, after which dangerous fires must be put out." But that's also a good summary of her dream The Coming Dark, dreamt seven years later. Jenny's dreams take a very long view! It makes me suspect that what this climb-down-blind-and-calm-the-fire represents may not be personal at all, but societal; a fever that may take years to cool.
• The fire-wizardry scene... It's so dense, and responds so slowly, as if Jenny's pushing a control rod into a reactor. Maybe it's this whole overheated society she's trying to cool down--if so, no wonder it's so massive and slow to respond.
• Both Jenny and Hank Sultan paint mandalas and dreams (for a sample of Hank Sultan's dream-paintings, see Celebrate Both). By choosing one of Hank's mandalas to celebrate, Jenny's dream may have been preventing false issues from arising. If the dream showed Jenny thinking "The art world neglects my work" she might dismiss that as personal. This way, she has to look at issues beside ego! The title, Mandala of the House of Sultan, certainly suggests two such issues: the radial painting-structure both Jenny and Hank have pioneered, and the idea that they're not lone cranks but a movement. If the Bauhaus could change how space and time were seen in the 20th Century, why not the House of Sultan in the 21st?
• The silhouettes are a puzzle, but an evocative one. Silhouettes of dream people... cut out of black paper. Outlines... negative space. Defining character by what's NOT there... Does the dream suggest a new way to look at dreams themselves? Outlining them, characterizing by absence? Ooh, that's so profound and Jungian I think I'm having a postmodern attack! Owww! (thud) Um... is there a doctor in the Web?
• Just kidding.

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