Dream/Space/Object…Death/Mother/Bird, 1999

published in Art Journal 58, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 49-56

By four o'clock Friday afternoon I had discovered the Blue Bird Café—alone anonymous dislocation, drinking a richly bitter espresso—between the university campus where I would begin a weekend workshop, Dream/Space/Object (for graduate painters and sculptors), and my attic room in the student house. Four hundred miles away—as the crow flies—my mother died from the prolonged degenerations of Alzheimer's Disease.

In the morning—although the wind was chill—the students gathered on a grassy circle between campus buildings. The participants had been given instructions in advance. They were to keep a dream journal for the week preceding the workshop. The night before the workshop they were to review these dreams. They were to extract one paragraph from the most compelling dream in which an essential image, narrative, or action could be compressed. My notes also suggested that they might find a totem or synergistic object relating in some way to a dream in anticipation of the workshop.

An unexpected theme always emerges in each Dream/Space/Object conference. Sitting in the circle, waiting for everyone to arrive, I wondered if my mother's death might be a shaping influence. From a green rucksack the young man seated next to me pulled notebooks and selection of small objects; among them was a skeleton! A little white Mexican female skeleton, a wind-up death toy; the skeleton danced in a circle shaking her hair and skirt. I realized then that the workshop might tilt toward the presence of death. What unexpectedly and actually hovers around a formal group situation mysteriously influences its potential direction.

Death/Mother/Bird—Dream/Space/Object became a flexible symbolic realm into which I introduced questions of paranormal experience, out-of-body experience, ESP for the participants to consider. A web of synchronicities—usually reveals itself within the unknown direction of the group process. I told them my mother had just died, as a surrounding, immediate context, giving an indication of a fabric of self caught in a particular situation or circumstance, and positing it as possibly relevant—never expecting it would become the key to a number of tragic losses members of this group had never previously communicated. My mother has died. . . . This only happens once. I had to let that be present. I would complete our workshop and then fly to her funeral.

To the student had the wind-up Mexican dancing toy skeleton I remarked, "This talisman you brought might have been mine." The group considered this coincidence—letting the death of my mother and the toy introduce active symbolic aspects of the conscious and unconscious, of presence and loss, how we might move between. I directed our considerations to the usual ethic that separates daily endeavor from psychic and spiritual awareness. I asked the class, "What helps us become more 'permeable,' so that perhaps we contact the dead or let them come into us?" The workshop would take our group energy and the compelling content of dream material to confront formulate underlying and powerful motives for making art. Proposing another question to myself: How do we approach creative motive when it is encrusted with social denial, personal inhibition, and cultural rationalizations? How to release this suppressed power, to be grasped as creative material by the artist/student? This workshop would weave an unexpected confluence of painful and sublime visitations with the dead and recognize the dead as carrying forward aspects of our own lost identity—the ghosts of family history.

Day One

1. Presentation of dream extract

2. Discussion of the unconscious: strange and familiar, nonrational events: déjà vu, predictive foreknowledge, unexplained physical sensations, etc.

3. Exercise: drawing the dream: its energy, its coloration

4. Exercise: set the dream drawing on fire and save two elements

5. Exercise: sculptural clay version of the "sacred elements" (tactility not exactitude; molding, shaping, sensation of the "thing")

6. Group examination and discussion of the drawings, the "saved" elements, the sculptural translation

7. Building awareness of archetypal and personal (idiosyncratic) mythology. Discussion of transformative implications and latent energies (i.e., violence, what is burnt in dream fire, cherishing of saved elements, association of personal history—sacrifice, loss, helplessness, power)

8. Drawing the dream blindfolded to release further aspects of its physicality

Day Two
9. Analysis of position of self in the dream narrative

10. Structure and repetition. Each person's main dream energy, or central narrative image is given to others to enact. The dreamer directs the others until the live action begins to correspond to the power of the dreamt action. Each action is then repeated continuously, at least ten times. The repetition of the basic image reveals deepening layers of unconscious and formal structure.

11. Ritualization. The addition of props, materials, extended movement in space as correlates to intensify the extracted dream images.

I began by discussing out-of-body experiences—asking each person in our circle, What is the connection between your “real” metabolic physical situation, your dream, and what the mind registers, recalls? What evidence of narrative value is returned? We talked about going to sleep and having strange physical sensations, experiencing synergies of the dream mind, such as suddenly falling through space, or flying, clenching teeth, grasping.

Everyone recalled some bewildering event that was out of the ordinary. A painting major, Katie, who grew up on a farm in Colorado, told a remarkable story of nearly freezing to death in a freak snowstorm. The high school closed early; she was only wearing her gym suit when she left the school bus. Her parents, who had promised to meet her at the bus stop a mile or so from the farm, were not waiting. It would be days before she found out they had suddenly been called away to another emergency—her older sister had been in a plane that crashed earlier in the same storm three hundred miles away. Katie began to lose consciousness waiting in the wind driven blizzard; she's fallen into the snow, strangely warm and comfortable. After an immeasurable time, within a dreamless sleep, she hears a hammering, squealing voice shrieking, "Get up, you fool! Get up! You must get up! You must! This is your last chance! Get up! Get up! Get up!" She staggered to her feet, coated in ice and snow, in extreme pain. Her flesh stings; she can hardly breathe. But it is now nighttime and she sees a glimmer of light through the dense, blowing snow. Following the light she staggers up to the only neighboring ranch, pounds on the door, and collapses. The neighbors carry her inside and plunge her into tepid water. Her life is saved. Meanwhile, her parents remain for a week at a hospital in southern Colorado where her sister is among the survivors of the plane crash. But her parents never get to know K. nearly froze to death—a displaced history!

Cory is beautiful, delicate, somewhat older than most of the students. She very quietly, nervously tells a story of starting to drive her car across a bridge, when she suddenly realizes that she is becoming the car. There is no difference between her body and the machine. If she can't stop the car, she knows she will be killed. She describes panic sensations, heart thumping. Drenched in sweat, she manages to brake the car and pull over on the other side of the bridge. She realizes that she can't stand up. She can't move her body. We all thought, Did she take a drug? What's behind this story? We sat in our circle petrified as she described the effort of opening the car door: arduous, a prolonged nightmare. She is unable to stand, so she crawls on her hands and knees, until she comes upon the brown trouser legs of a school crossing guard and collapses. The guard props her up on some grass and calls the police who take her away to the hospital. There she stays for several days until she comes out of it.
This fragment sits in the pot as we keep moving around our circle—all morning histories emerge—psychic, out of the ordinary. For the afternoon, the group has been assigned to return with drawings that depict an image distillation of a dream.

In the afternoon we begin to work with individual dream material. One student, Steve, is convinced he has nothing to attest to, nothing upsetting, nothing strange, no disturbing dreams. We can see he's nervous and repressed, just on the edge of speaking. Finally he says, "Okay, well, yes, if we insist, I did have one really disgusting dream that I can't forget, really horrible." In the dream he's stroking something, this pink thing which has crept up on him, and it's all wet—not just wet—"it's kind of real yooky sticky." (We all smile at him encouragingly.) In this dream, still sticky, he gets up and finds he has knives in his hands. He has to kill his parents. At the end of the dream he chops up the parental bodies and mashes them into the sticky gooey thing.
This is still day one! The next day we explore what we dreamed the night before, and see what the group process is effecting. At the end of this three-hour session Katie reports a dream from the week before, in which her father and brothers and she have just slaughtered a couple of head of cattle and some pigs, and the men have dragged all the carcasses along. She is carrying buckets to separate the organs and viscera. In the dream she takes off her clothes and reaches into the buckets, picks up the bloody organs, draping and spilling them all over her body, until she's covered with slimy viscera.

At the end of the morning of the second day, when everyone has related dream material, I make assignments of how we'll expand our work together. I ask Katie and Steve (of the hideous sticky pink thing) to work together, I encourage them: "You have the possibility to enact a collaborative dream event together. Let the viscera and sticky themes influence your ideas." (Those two will go to butcher shops in town to find supplies to prepare an enactment for the afternoon.)

I continue going around the circle. We come back to Cory, and at some point I ask her if there was something in her dream, or something in life that might explain the car hallucination/possession. Very gradually (over the two days) Cory's puzzle adheres. There have been two disastrous accidents in this young woman's life. Cory's mother is killed in a collision when a car runs a red light; she and her sister are in the back seat of the family car her father is driving. Earlier that day people had talked about certain kinds of pains they had, and Cory had said she always had a pain right there, against her chest. Ten years later she is a mother, driving with her adored little daughter. It's a rainy day, a car skids into theirs, and her daughter is killed. Cory is unhurt but her daughter dies in her arms—"Right here," she says—where she has a recurring pain. Now I'm worried: how can I turn this into an embrace and a release?

There's a very snaky, psychic, mystical student named Carlos, who is Mexican, Jewish, and gay. He doesn't exactly match up with anyone in the group, and I'm feeling a little stalled about his interactive position. I realize that he's very powerful as a conveyor; he can absorb a great deal of contradiction! I'm looking for someone to handle Cory's pain with her, to go there with her, and I believe Carlos can do this.

There's a lot going on with sixteen people in this workshop. Jeanette has presented a dream of circles and lines, endlessly repeated, representing aspects of self she cannot merge. I ask her to work with Cory and Carlos. Since she didn't inhabit her own pain, she might be open to help Cory and accompany Carlos's power. A tall, lanky guy, Bud, is extremely nervous, angry, and polite. He dreams this one dream over and over: he's in the principal's office, no one is around as he opens big pots of paint and starts to paint the walls in brilliant colors with huge brushes. The principal suddenly comes in, yelling, "You get out of here! You've ruined this room! What do you think you are doing?" Also in Bud's dreams he's in a library, where he starts to paint the walls. Old women come running in—"You can't paint in here!” I consider his depiction, rich with erotic metaphors of suppression and release, of expressive viscosity stroked against conventions of surface. Perhaps he really just wants to paint! (There's a room in the back that must have been a dressing room that's now a ruin, all wrecked.) I said to him, “You can have that room tomorrow. Get all the paints you can find, lots of paint, tape big brushes onto poles, and tomorrow you can paint all the walls.”

Margitte had told us of dreams of self-containment and utter passivity. Margitte was from Switzerland, a rosy face, smiling, very benign and receptive. She was skiing down a mountain slope past some soldiers who had grabbed her sister and were raping her, and stabbing her, and Margitte would just ski right on by. She related these dramatic events in dull, uninflected tones. The group was irritated by her passive dreams and asked, "Don't you ever get involved in your dream action?" The next morning I offer her a chance to become a cop. She will be assigned an active aggressive role: she is to prevent Bud from painting. She arrives with big mops and brooms, wearing galoshes, her body wrapped up in plastic bags. She is to stop the painter from painting. Whether or not Bud's dream (like Jeffrey's pink enveloping "thing") is a masturbatory construction or masked social aggression or pure creative demiurge, I decide to let the dream energy be expressed with maximum energy. He finds the biggest, most crude implements to paint with in the empty backstage room. Bud quickly and eagerly began to paint with brushes he had strapped onto five-foot-long mop handles. Paint was flying everywhere, and I mean everywhere! Margitte rushes into the center of strokes, with her mop and boots, racing to clean his strokes off the wall. Bud has this huge brush in motion, he intends to obliterate her! And he went whap, right to the side of her, and whap! to her other side. She's ducking, feinting, parrying as the paint is flying! These two enveloped in a fierce, dangerous duet of denial and assertion.

Katie and her partner, Steve, had gone to a butcher shop and selected soft, pink, wet sorts of organ meat. Looking strangely transfigured, they informed us they'd had a "private" performance event. We guess that the interactions with the taboo bloody meat led them to each other's bodies. They were ecstatic—glued side by side, blissful. He had viscerally enacted an exorcism of his profound sexual taboo. And she was capable of accepting, eroticizing his repulsion into desire. Together they had released physical power—pleasure displacing denial and fear.

Cory's connection to her dream-pain was astonishing. (Carlos, Jeanette, and Cory had gone off to evolve a ritual action in which they would exorcise or fulfill Cory's dream quest.) The previous meeting I had suggested to Cory, "I think it would be something to consider if you, in this situation, could invite your daughter back, because we all feel very affected by her loss, and if you feel that you can trust us enough, think about it overnight, and if you want to do this, you'll work with Carlos and Jeanette to invite your daughter back among us."

In the afternoon Carlos, Jeanette, and Cory appeared on the open stage behind our work area. They moved slowly in a dirgelike procession—each figure startlingly enveloped by a huge cloud of black tulle. As they pulled the cloud of tulle down, we saw that the three of them were naked to the waist. Wrapped up in the middle of the enveloping tulle is a bundle Cory lifts and slowly opens. On the stage before us, in the shape of a cross, she slowly places tiny glasses, a little green shirt, and two little shoes. The clothes her daughter was wearing when she died. Cory is in a trance, Carlos guides her to two chairs facing out. Here they sit side by side. Chanting a rhythmic incantation in Spanish, Carlos reaches his hand into a bucket of red paint, then extends his painted hand to slap Cory's chest—repeatedly. Soon, Cory's breasts are completely drenched with blood-red hand prints where she held her daughter as she died. She's weeping. We're all weeping. Jeanette takes Cory by the hand and leads her to the tulle pile. Jeanette lies on her back in the tulle, still holding Cory's hand, pulling Cory down onto herself. Cory just tips over, falls onto her. Jeanette accepts her weight, embraces her. When they slowly rise up, Jeanette's body is imprinted with the paint-blood.

It is very different if you have an entire week or a couple of days to reflect on such intense events. It's scary if you pull so many fragile and hidden events out too fast. Everyone's raw. I have to be very wary of that. It is also essential that we stay together as a group to avoid "crashing." The workshop situation opened us to psychic, sensory, and erotic collaboration in trust and risk. After a workshop people have a clear connection to one another—a powerful intimacy. And there is a sense of infinitely more to build on together. This intimacy and trust is releasing, inspiring.

Ritual healing unravels denied, painful, taboo areas. In individual psychotherapy there are times when you feel you are lying, or not telling everything, or that something significant might break through next week or never! The group consciousness, when it's focused and involved, sees clearly to the heart of the matter with a pure instinct for what is denied, suppressed, and crucial. A close community spontaneously comes into existence. At the end of the two-day workshop we have a celebration dinner. The celebration is hilarious, wild even, as we review our events and spin them from the creative present to future creative possibility. They had enacted performance ritual—its personal depth, and archetypal density, aspects of collaboration and self-revelation—and organized their dream events into real space and time. This is an alchemical process, just as paint is blood for us—a medium, an essential fluid that carries psychic exchange.

Finally separated from the group, in the car ready to leave, they suddenly appeared out on the balcony of the student house howling farewell like a wolf pack—this splendid HOWLING resounding in the night air as I flew to my mother's funeral.