This isn't a dream, but it's Colquhoun's best-known painting--nearly as famous as Magritte's apple-headed gentleman or Meret Oppenheim's furry teacup. Colquhoun was in the bathtub and suddenly the floating soapdish was a Greek vessel in legendary times--so her knees had to be Scylla and Charybdis, those archetypal navigation hazards in the Straits of Messina. Of course, the vaginal shape of the gap and the idea of the boat slipping between her thighs suggested something else too. She painted the visual pun as she saw it. Sex as shipwreck, shipwreck as sex.

I saw Scylla in an artbook when I was a teen. Twenty years later I had an epic dream, Fisher Girls, of a sea voyage to a sunken city reached through a narrow, high, natural arch. When I woke and sketched it, it looked vaginal. I looked up Scylla and found the same shapes. That unconscious echo of Colquhoun was one hint that my dream, like her double vision, was about sexual discovery.

Scylla, Ithell Colquhoun, 1938

At the Narrow Passage, Wayan, 1996

SOURCE: Image, Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds, 2025, plus some biographical info from Medea's Charms: Selected Shorter Writings of Ithell Colquhoun, 2019.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites