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RAVENNA

Dreamed 1994/12/25 by Chris Wayan

Mysterious tents in San Francisco's Civic Center

I'm walking through a line of small buildings in the heart of the City. Each is freestanding and not quite a cube: truncated or trapezoidal, leaning in a bit, like a partly petrified tent. The edges all have strong beams; the walls are translucent. Feel like I've seen these structures before--but they've grown.

The tents have open doorways, more or less in line; I walk through them all. Inside, on each wall, hang huge colored drawings of mine--silk paintings? Tracing paper? Translucent, anyway. Floor to ceiling, each a yard wide, they glow from the light leaking through, like stained glass. And, like church glass, they have spirit-power! You can feel it.

How'd I paint these? Why can't I remember? I look closer at a couple. They're line drawings first silkscreened onto fabric or fine paper, then dyed or watercolored in intricately textured rusts and golds. A woman I know walks in from the next tent, sees me and says "Hey, Wayan! What are you planning for that new one?" Oh! The series is still in progress?

Silk-paintings inside the Civic Center tents. Click for detail.
A figure I'd sketched but only half-painted in a dream; by Wayan

She leads me to an undone picture. Well, half-done. It has a silkscreened line-drawing, but only half-complete. It shows a woman stretching up on her toes, short-waisted, legs ballet-long, in wide fourth position, or second, beautiful, naked and somehow wild and even a little fierce--but inked in and definite only from her toes up to her waist--just a few tentative lines above her navel.

I try to firm in her upper half in the same style--can I equal that masterful lower half? Struggle to find a face to match those hips, eyes that her pussy won't upstage. And I need to watch the proportions: I tend to make heads too big, long neck, short torso.

But with the golden luminescence of previous successes all around me, I feel confident. I can create sexy sacred images--for they're all around me.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

I paint the top half of the last stained-glass woman inside the tents. Click for painting without the painter.

THE NEXT DAY

I keep reading Carl Jung's autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections." When he goes to North Africa and lives in Arab tents a while, my ears prick up...

Then he visits Ravenna. He and a friend found fascinating mosaics on the four walls of a small church. Jung was surprised: from a previous trip, he recalled windows, not mosaics.

He asked around, looked them up... but found nothing written about mosaics.

Curious, he finally went back to the church, and found windows!

Finally he learns the mosaics he saw DID exist, but in a related shrine--and they were destroyed centuries ago!

So what did he see? Where, exactly, was he? Or should I say when?

Something peculiar happened to him in that chapel. Slipped into another time--whether past, or parallel, I don't know, but... but those mosaics were elsewhen.

NOW

The tent-buildings and glowing wall-paintings in my dream now feel like a pagan, erotic parody of Jung's strange psychic experience--but dreamed just before I read of his own little time-trip. Psychic too--but a mirror image of Jung's vision. He somehow saw centuries in the past; I looked one day in the future.

Which is weirder?

Why the ESP element? Or, if you're that sort of skeptic, the "coincidence that leads our foolish, naive narrator to the impression of ESP"? However you characterize it, you can't ignore it; it's the rhino in the middle of the living room. I see luminous, fascinating art covering the walls; next day, Jung does--impossible art, art destroyed centuries before. The dream appears to predict an experience, reading a bizarre passage in Jung, that is itself about just such a paranormal experience--clairvoyance through time.

So what's the point? Not to convince me dreams can be predictive; I'd already had years of dreams proving that to my satisfaction. Nor did it come to tell me to be an artist; I draw all the time. Nor that sexy art can be sacred too; preachin' to the already-converted there.

I think this dream's core message was mainly emotional not intellectual: "Hey, CHEER UP! You're not the helpless geek you think. Jung could look through time, and so can you--here, we'll prove it."

Small stained-glass window of nude dancer standing in 4th, en pointe. Dream sketch by Wayan; click to enlarge. ACTIONS:

1: Fill myself in piece by piece, not dramatically. Start from the ground up--basics. Yeah, right... as if there's a choice!

2: Those stained-glass dryads or werewolves or angels or future dates... they looked good (in the dream at least). And I loved painting them! So act on my urges and quit dissing my own sense of what feels sexy and right for me. My craziest impulses may be angels from the future.

3: Uh... how about yours?

Small stained-glass window of nude dancer standing in 4th, en pointe. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.


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