I have been interested in dreams almost since day one. And mine were complicated, coloured with advanced dramaturgy, character development and contrast. Many times, I also felt, that my dreams were more colourful than life itself. It is not surprising then that I felt the need to remember and share these with the people around me from real life. So, I was merely a child, when I started to work with dreams by keeping a dream diary. I filled several notebooks with dream stories and drawings with either colours or colour descriptions. I found out, for example, that burgundy red and pale yellow were two colours dominant in many of my dreams.
During the corona lockdown, I decided to paint for my exam project. I could have chosen a more digital type of art, one that would go along with the flow of extreme digitisation happening during the spring of 2020. Instead, I chose to reset myself to my factory settings, sat down with a piece of paper and sketched the happenings of my inner life from memory. I focused on both dreams and memories for my research with the aim of also finding out what relations they might have with one another – through painting. I also consulted some of the writings of Carl Gustav Jung and his followers – it was time – to look more deeply into the theory on connecting and understanding one’s dreams.
For this part of my exam project, I explored several ways to get in contact with my dreams through art – out of which, I would like to share three methods you can also try at home!
Following One Dream-motif Through Different Media
This method is good for those who want to analyse or explore one motif from their dreams. This technique funnels down our attention from the whole of the dream into one certain motif. It is also good for those who are just beginning to work with their dreams. How do you do this? When you wake up, take a minute to remember one motif from your dream that resonated with you: something you liked, disliked, but most importantly, something you can remember! Take this momentum from the dream and start sketching it on paper or on your iPad. You can re-draw the dream as many times you want to and can move on to using coal, water colour, acrylic or any other techniques. Re-painting your motif several times might take you away from the actual dream but can help you explore your real life associations with it – and thus this technique can help you discover the connection between the dream and your daily life.
One of our classmates at elementary school died, a Roma boy, who picked up an old cigarette from the street, got a tooth infection from it, and died during surgery from anaesthesia. In my dream, I was biking on a dark road at night heading to the woods by the meadows. I saw a dim light coming from the sky and met dark figures walking on the road. As I fell from the bike, like Paul from his horse, I met my classmate, who showed me which one of these towns hanging from the skies he lived in. His name was also Paul.
Four-dimensional Drawing
Four-dimensional drawing can help you explore not only hidden content in your dreams but can also help you remember your dream more in its complexity.
Many of you might have also experienced that it is hard to remember all the aspects of a dream: the moment you would start writing it down or sharing its plot with a friend or family member, the story that seemed to make so much sense to you has already fallen apart when retold. Four-dimensional drawing can help you with that.
Why is it four dimensional? I call this technique four-dimensional drawing, because it involves depicting your dream like a film: you might draw transparent walls and several arms or several selves in the same picture showing your movement in time. You can use just a paper and a pen or can draw on your iPad if that is easier. The point is to stay in the flow of your dream without focusing on the “prettiness” or cleanness of your picture.
In this dream, I was in a Mediterranean, medieval, circular square that turned out to be a Colosseum-like building in the middle of a secret forest. The dream started (as far as I can remember), in the middle of the square and it was only later I learned more and more about the surroundings when I saw the wild animals frequenting the fountain in the middle the square for drinking water. There was a small child in a nightgown called Julia, and I was both her Mom and daughter. I was also on the train passing the secret forest where the hidden medieval building was to be found.
Capturing the Atmosphere in the Dream Through Remembering Colours
Another technique I discovered during my project was to capture the atmosphere of my dreams through focusing on colours and light conditions. Instead of dwelling on remembering the narrative or the characters in the dream, you can just close your eyes and can try to evoke the colours in the rooms and spaces within the dream. Asking questions from yourself regarding these elements can also help you evoke the atmosphere of your inner world of the night:
Was the dream dark or light? What did you feel when it was light/dark? Did the light conditions change together with your emotions? Was one spot more lit in the dream?
While answering these questions to yourself, you can already start sketching with colours – you can use pencils, paint or a painting app on your iPad. Anything you would create or come up with here will be fabulous in its own right. And while this technique might not help you disseminate your dream to others, it can be a both really fun and serious personal practice for evoking dreams through making art.
In this dream, I was on a bus in the post-lockdown Budapest, doing reverse acrobatic exercises on the floor, while it was really warm and there was a lot of sunshine coming in from the windows of the old Icarus bus.
Here I dreamed of our childhood home in Budapest, where also a ton of warm yellow light flooded in from the windows. It was by these same windows; Santa Claus would place his treats every 6 December and an angel would place her daily treats for us during advent.
These three techniques for getting in contact with your dreams through art can, indeed, be mix-and-matched, accompanied by narratives or descriptions, or further developed into other methods and techniques. I hope you enjoyed reading about them and got a bit inspired to try one of these! Sweet dreams for everyone!
This post is inspired by, but not identical with my research and Norwegian research paper "Mumus: Fremkalling av minner gjennom å lage kunst" (2020).
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