The difficulty one encounters in trying to paint dreams is that often you cannot remember them. Dream memory is exceptionally fugitive. That feature of itself draws in a certain scientific interest (for those who study dreams) because it’s so startlingly different from ordinary perception. While you will most probably forget what you did this morning over the course of a few days, you are most unlikely to forget it seconds after it happens. But how often has one awakened from a dream only to see it seem to disintegrate even as one watches?
Some dreams last in memory and others don’t. Even what distinguishes the one sort of dream from the other is unknown. But while dreams cannot be counted on to furnish stable material for art, the process that one’s mind uses to dream is most probably accessible — to some extent — in a waking state.
I’m searching for some random things to include in certain pictures that are in the works. I say the things are random, but I only mean that they’re random in the way that dream elements often seem to come in bizarre forms. And one thing clearly connects to another as though by some great law of causality. But when you tell the dream to someone, it seems to make no sense at all. I am putting things into pictures just because, and wondering afterwards if the stream of consciousness leads somewhere.
Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake.) — Walt Whitman, Years of the Modern
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