Dreams

If there’s a visual language every one of us uses every day, it’s the language of dreams. And dreams underscore how much meaning is carried by imagery, in the feeling created by overall relationships in the scene and not in what the things are in the scene. So much of waking life is concerned with identity and definitions. But definitions are not meaning. A book thrown at us means something quite different than the book in our lap. It is only in the relationships that we  see conditions of attack or comfort. A dream can emphasize the more complex feelings like confinement, paranoia or disorientation, and every one of them could be taking place in our living room. The gestalt, the feel of the whole picture, is understood like we understand the relative safety or creepiness of a new place we visit. Our initial impression includes what we expect from the type of surroundings in relation to our personal intentions.

All the meaning of dreams is connected to how it feels to be there. The attraction for the surrealists was the complete visual freedom to put anything with anything, to neutralize the power of definitions and emphasize the feeling we get from the whole picture. The room in the dream may look exactly like it always does, but the foreboding connects to a memory and what about it should be reinforced. Erich Fromm wrote that dreams process emotional evaluations of situations that weren’t noticed in the practical concerns of the day. Dreams are largely visual and do their job whether we remember them or not. Free from real world constraints the subjective experience felt by the dreamer is interpreted with whatever symbols fit. When something is wrong with the picture it shows.

Visual language is the dominant mode in dreams. We are shown the way to look at something where conscious purposes may obscure an important ingredient. Dreams are a mechanism in our ongoing adjustments for psychological balance. With conscious purposes focusing most of our attention during the day, subtle feelings about experience are missed. The current idea about the dream compensating for the onesidedness of waking life dates back to early Taoism which felt the same thing. The language of dreams is the universal language. They portray subjective states as actions with greater precision than language can manage.

Many who study dreams say the faculty of imagination continues at night and artists like Salvador Dali felt night imagination, unobstructed by conscious desires was far superior and developed his system of waking himself so as to do “hand painted dream photographs”.

Non-artists have experienced the insight that led to a solution or a discovery in a dream.

Scholars of most religions treat dreams with respect. It’s written in the Talmud- “A dream is its own interpretation.” This is a way of saying dreams show us something. Rabbi Jonathan said, “A man is shown in his dreams what he thinks in his heart.” This is like what Emerson meant when he said the wise person reads their dreams for self-knowledge, not the details but the quality.

Dreams emphasize the importance of your position, where you are. Daydreaming envisions a different position and dreaming of the future is where you want to be. Visual language is everyone’s heritage. Conscious cultivation of it can deepen our holistic understanding.

Hidden

The Position of the Body

    It may have been the taste of cake and tea that prompted Proust’s stream of memories, but for me the trigger is more often an action. I was shaping an old flat sable brush with a sharp knife, and a cloud of memories unfurled from deep in my past. As I pressed the flat side to my worktable and scraped the side, I was back in a friend’s dining room and an intense bearded man was demonstrating how to renew the brush there at the table after dinner. Then the image shifted to the friend who had the dinner party, who was himself the hub of a wheel of memories associated with Maryland Institute, as we called it then.        

    It was this very specific action that spurred my memory to an extensive network of associations. I often think of the body like a pliable tuning fork that depending on the position resonates with and evokes imagery of the past that is associated with being in that position. Studies have confirmed how hormones are affected by body position and then change our mood. As bodies in motion it makes sense that our habitual ways of moving would reinforce certain attitudes in our minds. And before the studies of hormones and neurotransmitters, there were psychological treatments based on the idea, change the body to change the mind. One of these is the Alexander Technique, which addresses the amount of tension that accumulates in the body over time. The body contracts with anxiety and confusion. The treatment offers corrective motions to help pull the body out of its habitual positions and release that accumulation of tension that drains energy. Moshe Feldenkrais was a judo master who had a similar idea. He thought people were frustrated and unhappy because they’d never learned to use their bodies properly, thought too much energy was lost to wasted movement. His books and methods educate people on how to recognize self-defeating body positions and provide exercises that demonstrate better ones.

   New research has shown how exercise is good for the mind as well as the emotions. Chemically there’s the increase in dopamine and BDNF that’s been shown to promote growth of new neurons. In addition, our conceptual structure is built on the foundation of embodiment, the body’s experience of the world. Most of our conceptual understanding and scientific reasoning depends on physical experience of weight, balance and movement. Hundreds of years ago Leonardo da Vinci emphasized that exercise was not just important to health and vitality but to the improvement of mental functioning. Continuing to extend bodily experience is especially important in a time when so much daily activity is done sitting in one place.

    The signals of core wisdom begin in the body. How the body adjusts to the spaces around it is basis for understanding visual art. Art develops core wisdom by distilling the experience of the body and strengthening the communicative power of visual language. The adjustment of the body is registered consciously as feeling, which is response to what we assume the circumstance will need from us. Our built-in response to visual form reflects the meaning we attach to that adjustment, the overall assessment of the physical or psychological environment. Looking at art can strengthen understanding of the body’s adjustment to visual form. Using the body strengthens the conceptual foundation itself. Development of our mental and psychological health requires physical participation.

Fulcrum

Illusionism and Entertainment

Recently a friend and past student sent me a drawing that amazed her, and reminded me of how seeing something astonishing, made with skillful illusionistic trickery, has been a source of entertainment throughout history. Several things converge at this particular enjoyment. Neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde wrote a book with Sandra Blakeslee on magic and the brain that includes a section on Trompe l’oeil, art that fools the eye. Like in performance magic, the unexpected and seemingly impossible induces a childlike delight and the desire to share the experience with others.

Basically, when you fool people about reality you get their attention. While everything meets our expectations, we stay inside our heads, but when it deviates from what we expect, it demands notice. The level of focus and concentration is facilitated by the increased dopamine that comes with surprise. The brain encourages attention. The pleasure at being fooled in a non-threatening way is why illusionism has maintained a level of popularity since ancient times when there were actually artists’ competitions to see who could do the most realistic work. Not so unlike sports, mastery is appreciated.

The skill necessary to create illusions is another part of the attraction. Denis Dutton emphasized the innate response to virtuosity. We are attracted to the beauty of something well done. I’ve read that the brain made a big jump in size when we started using tools, and again when we started polishing them. The brain encourages what improves it. The admiration of skill is a feel-good emotion meant to stimulate our own wish to excel.

Fooling the eye is not about personal taste, the physical body reacts to what it deems real, so when I go to sweep the paper off the top of my drawing and discover I’ve drawn it, I can’t help but laugh at fooling myself. Ira Glass, talking about practicing a magic trick, said you’ve got the trick when you fool yourself.

Response to illusion is often laughter. And laughter is demonstrated to be good for us. Studies at the University of Maryland say it’s good for blood vessels and boosts certain antibodies that build the immune system. In an article at the Mayo Clinic website they emphasized the stimulation of organs, intake of oxygen and release of endorphins.

Laughter is known to build flexibility in thinking, loosening the mind by defying expectations. To release the clutch of a particular way of seeing is to open the edges of the mind and let in more perspective. Illusion is a playful reminder of the limits of our perceptions and the wisdom of uncertainty. Understanding that you are often wrong pushes perception deeper and extends self-awareness.

Today’s entertainment extends the possibilities for illusion as 3D movies and virtual reality grow in popularity. The power of computer graphics to envision whatever can be imagined as a whole world may open the mind to new ways of thinking. It’s entertainment that stimulates the mind and opens the possibility of evolving our thinking in a visual spatial way.