THE STAR
I am influenced by dreams, especially for my art and music. I decided that in addition to posting my work, I would start blogging about my dreams too.
Someone once told me that eating leafy greens every day will make a person dream. If that is true, then I am no exception: I eat a hefty salad of mixed greens every day for lunch.
I studied under
Robert Moss, the dream expert, at Kripalu, a yoga center, years ago. My dreams had become difficult to ignore and I was introduced to his writing by a friend. When I saw that he was going to be at Kripalu, I sought out his help.
The experience of the workshop was something right out of
Be Here Now by Ram Dass (when Ram Dass first meets the guru, Neem Karoli Baba). It was just as wrenching as the experience in that book, except the *guru* at the workshop took me by total surprise, an unsuspected young woman in typical western US dress of only 19 years old who saw all of the traumatic events of my life in the private corners of my mind... in another unsuspected place-- a dining room! I had the same experience as Ram Dass did too: racing mind, falling down, unable to speak, crying my heart out, etc, etc. A friend who went there with me told me that we should probably never speak of what happened to us at Kripalu because... who would believe it? It's just too *out there* for most people.
So, I won't ask you to believe anything, but I will say that the experience was a life-changing event that seemed to leave a distinct break with my past, past relationships & old habits of deny, deny, deny, don't look too closely at that phenomenon, don't listen to what you can't explain, pay no attention to that hunch, dreams are just churning out stuff from the day, and so on. The "deny habit" came from wanting to please intellectual doubters, left brained types who believe that the only realities in the world are what the five senses can perceive.
But... the one dream area I never spent time trying to ignore before or after this experience was with my art and music.
Usually when I dream of an art form or ideas, I delve right in. Of course, there are too many images that flash through my mind when I am sleeping, so some of it I simply write down for later (like, for instance, at this moment in time, I am working on 14 pieces at once).
Anyway, when I was in college, I was busy thinking of myself as a sculptor. These are the kinds of pieces I was making (note: the images are from scanned slides, not high quality, & the lighting is a bit funky, but that's the best I could do then):
And while I was making these sculptures I had many dreams of making these kinds of pieces:
Anyway, after I had 3 somewhat identical dreams, I got on the potters wheel and it took many, many years before I could tackle the pieces I dreamt about, but I kept true to "the vision" and never looked back.
