I was just looking back on my notes of my past two dreams and they were both sort of creepy and strange. this morning, as I hit the snooze button, I had the brief dream of going to an exhibition with artworks by children, with my sister and my mum. But in my encounter there was only two installations - they were seemingly side by side but also quite distant from each other. the dimensions of each were not unlike what you see in arcades - like those mini basketball hoops. Both were interactive. the ‘exhibition space’ itself was strange too.. off-coloured walls, but still considered white, it resembled an old community shopping mall that only appeared out of touch when you’ve just been back from the newly-built one, shiny and modern. no, this one was unnecessarily spaced, like they didn’t have enough content, shops to fill it in with, and your voices almost echo off the walls, but it doesn’t quite reach there. The ceiling was high. In fact, I don’t remember seeing the roof. but I knew it ended somewhere in that aged whiteness. This kind of mall reminded me of the malls I see in London and Christchurch, London I experience now, Christchurch I experienced ten years ago and recently in the summer. It was like a time capsule - nothing changed. Still had the alliteration in its name. Anyway, in the dream I look over to my sister who is interacting with the exhibit to the left. she was using a fishing rod to hook onto a larger-than-human, seemingly pumping but probably not, heart. around it were other very fleshy looking organs, all found together like individual creatures. This was also not unlike the visuals in Akira (which I’m pretty sure, in the animated tv series Bojack Horseman, referenced in one episode - or at least strongly resembled - when Diane morphed into this disgusting flesh-pile of organs and membranes and blood and god knows what, while Bojack was experiencing a bad trip) although in the dream it wasn’t as gory and dramatic, it was matter-of-fact and just- there. i think I only saw maybe 3 organ-type shapes too, from a distance. I remember her successfully fishing out that heart. I look back at what I’m doing to the right/ center - this installation was also intriguing - it seemed a thought out idea but poorly executed. It was all cardboard, and the audience (me) had to pull on a string. But it was tangled. My mum, who was with me I guess, somehow knew how to untangle it. she untangled it, and I was able to pull the string, and I immediately see that it’s a cardboard recreation of a guillotine. I don’t know what I was supposed to be cutting off, that bit of the dream is blurry. But the colours there seem to be reddish or blue. of course, the cardboard felt very light with the string and it feels like it was going to fall apart. Also, I was standing quite far away from it - the string stretches for at least ten steps. So when I realised it was a guillotine type it seemed to hit a part of my brain immediately and understanding its meaning hit slowly. There was also a scene transition in the end where I am looking, perhaps taking videos, and my mum was in the shot. She had a low ponytail, and was younger, perhaps in her forties, I wondered then if people will still say she looks like me, which, in real life people do, a lot.
As for the earlier dream of killing my family and sitting at the dinner table, unfortunately I cannot recall a lot. Each dream extraction is different, sometimes it is very vivid in your mind when you wake up, sometimes it is rapidly dissipating like quicksand and you grasp at its loose strands, sometimes you are so desperate to document it down that you hallucinate yourself writing it down/planning what to write down only to drift off to sleep again. This has all happened to me before, and it really depends what you do after having the dream that dictates its type of existence. For vivid dreams like the natural disaster nightmare for Family Dinner Illuminated by The End Of The World, I recall it very vividly after having it, I wrote it down, somewhat, and the more detailed I am visually and emotionally the better, and sometimes I can recall certain scenes like the cinematic panning of my view through the window over the volcano mouth; but what inevitably happens is that the memory of it gets manipulated every time, especially if you tell it in different ways, even slightly, as you word it differently it begins to shift. Did I even see the faces of my family or did I just intrinsically know they were there? I am saddened by the fact that I cannot experience the full, extremely real dread of before-moment-of-death, the overwhelming fear. The point is not wanting to feel the bad feelings, the point is experiencing the dream like a first-hand wonder. A dream is precious because it will only Ever happen once - and it is guaranteed that you forget it - and that is the sad but precious thing about it - just like life, I suppose. So I guess by documenting them in this way - first writing it down - embracing the inevitable nuances in change from the original - and perhaps dramatisation - though most times it certainly doesn’t feel like it - as well as the lack of logical fixings - I am solidifying it into something that cannot dissipate so easily. Perhaps translating it into another medium - from the abstract to the - I don’t want to say real but - physical - something I can see and experience, albeit a bit differently but the core of it is there, for that is how it was birthed. Because I have a weak memory, in all aspects, dreams from a day ago have already dissipated and I have to read my notes again for a recall. But for some, I only have a few words. For some, they are gibberish. For these cases I suppose I can only embrace what I think I meant when I wrote those words down. I am constructing a narrative plucked from a dream-reality. This is the case for the killing family dinner table dream - it strongly links to that one scene in Shutter Island when he realised his wife had not only killed their children, but saying how she still wants to have meals with them at the dinner table. and that imagery is definitely not a new one - it’s a concept that you hear about in those true crime stories - using the dead bodies for a certain purpose. Perhaps last year I was watching Shutter Island again because it was a beyond genius piece of cinematography, it was a film that blew my mind for the first time in a long while (the other major one being Confessions, of course) and those last scenes of him finding out the murder of his children honestly chilled you to the bone and the colours were so gaudy and everything was so sunny and beautiful and overwhelming and you think ah, this is what it’s like living. It’s beautiful but I have to suffer because this is human life. The contrast between the nonchalant wife and the frantic, desperate protagonist was wonderful as well - like how I tried to orchestrate the characters in the Family Dinner painting with the foxes. The visual of him laying his dead children in a row was etched into my brain. the colours seemed almost neon in my memory they were so bright . I did say I wanted to experiment with neon colours but.. it can be problematic.. we’ll see. in my notes for this dream I also mentioned that it was not unlike the atmosphere in Parasite - and their grand, clean, modern dinner table. It was spacious and the house had large glass windows also. There is something curious about large glass windows when you think about it. You often see them in ‘modern’ designs. It is almost like you want people to see into your home. Or that it brings you closer to the outside without ever stepping out. Or you are transitioning Into a glass house (this reminds me of a teenage everyday/romance novel I read back in the day, the author described their house as being a glass house - yes, a modern design - and how she could clearly see into the ups and downs of her own family without ever stepping into it - when she’s looking from a distance, the tensions of each family member is crystal clear. People in the neighbourhood refer to it as The Glass House), so fragile in its nature, it is almost like a jewel than something to be lived in. Oftentimes in grand architecture like this you see constructed nature outside - like in Parasite with the freshly trimmed grass and very large garden space - or in Lisbon, the museum that resembled the house in Parasite, also with a stunning view of ‘nature’ in that particular window a number of us basked in the sun in front of. (And this applies to natural history dioramas as well! the large glass plane that separates and distills the nature indoors) What I’m saying is - large glass windows are undeniably beautiful because they usually let us see what we want to see (generally, I’m speaking of those modern mansion type designs) but it also speaks to the things that we should see like world injustices and family tensions which is largely what I explored in the Family Dinner painting. That being said, I’d love to have a house with a large glass window some day.