Self-portrait, Remedios Varo, May 1923 (age 14)

In her years of puberty, Remedios... nourished herself on erotic fantasies, as shown by this dream she told later as an example of the power of the occult in her life:

One night, a strange being entered through my window and lay on top of me: he was like the devil. I resisted, but his calor [both heat and ardor] was immense.

The following day, without my having said a thing, my grandmother at the breakfast table asked me: "Remedios, what happened to you? Your hair is scorched."

SOURCE: Viajes inesperados: el arte y la vida de Remedios Varo by Janet Kaplan, 1998 ed, p18 (my translation). PORTRAIT: ibid, p27. DATE: from the portrait. Dream may be a few years earlier.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Varo published few records of dreams--her posthumous Letters, Dreams & Other Writings contains only ten--so it's hard to assess how much of her (very!) dreamlike art is genuinely dream-inspired. So anecdotes like this one help show that her dreamlife really did parallel (and predate) her paintings; just because she didn't document dream-origins doesn't mean they weren't dream-inspired.

Don't be too quick to dismiss the claim that Varo's dream-devil scorched her hair. I too have had a couple of dreams leaving physical traces: a dream-explosion leaving ears ringing and afterimages, and a dream-snakebite leaving marks. Only two, out of 40,000 dreams--but two is not zero. Before you scoff, remember science until a generation ago insisted lucid dreams were theoretically impossible, too; yet it's a recent, radical, and sweeping assumption that all dreams are mere internal simulations. We don't know what the dreamworld is.

I've dubbed this rare sort of dream Natalian, after the earliest example I know of, Natalius the Confessor, some 1800 years ago.

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