I am at the very end of a long life with a complete 31-year teaching career, childhood trauma, three kids when who are now adults, an interest in knowing about the answers to both mysteries and ordinary things, and an imagination so vivid I have to wonder how much of all of that is real. Like Socrates, I don’t really know anything. Everything I have in my head that is even remotely akin to wisdom is based on observation and experiment, wrapped up with Reason, and boiled in a broth of Skepticism. I am well aware that imagination can skew everything if you let it.
Here’s something I believe to be true based on experience and evidence;
Lucid dreaming is a real thing that some people do. I have done it numerous times. It simply means becoming aware that you are actually dreaming in the course of the dream. You can then take total control of the dream. Most of the dreams I have had like this involve flying without an airplane. I have also had a dream of running naked through the old grade-school building where I went through grades K through 6. Everyone was laughing at me, but I took control and made all my classmates run naked with me, even the girls I never saw naked in real life.
I have also experienced a Close Encounter of the Third Kind although I strongly believe that, even though the aliens were exactly like the ones that Whitley Streiber described in his book, Communion, it was really only a very vivid dream. I have learned about such dreams over time that many of them are the result of childhood trauma, like the trauma of being sexually assaulted by a sadist, which happened to me at the age of ten. Many of these so-called alien abductions, then, are no more than vivid trauma dreams that under hypnosis get recalled as reality. I have also had trauma dreams about tornados caused by the Belmond Tornado of 1969, a night I spent fearing that my parents were dead. These dreams can seem so real that you can feel the wind on your dream face or a campfire warming your bare feet outdoors at night. I am pretty sure that my encounter with gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli was like that. The fear it gave me up and down my spine was the ghost of the fear my assailant gave me when I was ten.
Dreams can also Predict the Future. This I believe due to a large number of strange experiences. My tornado dreams often come right before a major tragedy like one of my car accidents, or my Great Grandma Hinckley’s death. One night in college I dreamt of my childhood friend Bobby falling out of the back of a blue pickup truck. Less than a week later I was told in the family phone call that Robert had actually been hospitalized when he fell out of a truck. And the pickup was allegedly blue. I also dreamed of being in the home of another of my high school friends where a number of his relatives were gathered to mourn the loss of his stepfather. It was a Friday night dream. The following Monday at school I learned all about his stepfather’s Friday night motorcycle accident. Eerily, some of the relatives I saw in that dream were people I only later learned were his relatives.
Of course, you cannot change the outcomes of things by a prediction-based dream. And none of this nonsense may actually be true due to the random nature of real life and the faultiness of my own stupid perceptions in my own stupid head. So, I can’t really know these things. I may have all the conclusions wrong. But the best wisdom I have to offer here is… well, it all MAY BE TRUE.
Seeing Through an Artist’s Eyes
It is not an easy thing to explain. Artists don’t see things using only their eyes. The brain intrudes in the process. For instance, you are welcome to interpret the picture above any way you like. But the way I see it will be nothing like what you thought this picture is about. You probably see two very different girls here. There is actually only one. I know because, as the artist who drew both parts of this picture, I actually know where the ideas came from. There is only one girl in the picture. Dilsey Murphy, in front and wearing her Carl Eller Minnesota Vikings’ jersey, is based about 33% on the older of my two sisters. On the outside she is pragmatic, no-nonsense, and focused on living a family life that is as normal as possible. But the inner Dilsey is the African leopard-princess. She dreams of going on Tarzan adventures in the movie-jungles of the mind with a handsome male hero. She is fierce, loyal, and completely independent, not even needing the hero she adventures with. In fact, she often saves him.
This picture is about the idyllic parts of my childhood. The mother figure is doing a ritual dance. She is in tune with the music of daily life. She is closely attuned also to her responsibilities of stewardship in her society. Both children are nude. I cropped this picture so that it is not rude and showing Smiling Boy’s penis. But both children are bathed in nature and sunshine, not just because I am pro-nudism personally, but because clothing covers up innocence and joy.
This one is easier to interpret. I was an ESL teacher. I had students who spoke Spanish as their first language and students who learned to speak Mandarin Chinese as their first language. It makes for a classroom that becomes a cultural mixing bowl. You have to learn how to deal with people who are very different than you,, but are benefitting from learning English together.
Every picture the artist draws or paints has its own weirdness embedded inside it. The way the artist sees it is probably never the same as how the viewer thinks about it. And that is as it should be. But as a viewer of art, it is hoped that you will at least try to think about what the artist means to say..
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Filed under artwork, colored pencil, coloring, commentary, Paffooney
Tagged as Saturday Art Day