Time to Dream
The girl with the braid woven into her hair gazes out of the window, head in her hands, staring at the blue sky, the clouds drifting past, the birds darting back and forth to build their nests. It would be madness not to look outside and instead fix her gaze on the teacher at the front of the class, the grey board scrawled full of grammatical terms, the classmates staring just as blankly into space. What a strange choice that would be — an imposed choice above all, a curb on her inner freedom. Where no one else can reach, no one should be making the decisions either. Her inner world is hers and hers alone, and it's fed by wherever her gaze is allowed to wander.
"Mr and Mrs de Vries, surely you understand that it's highly unusual for your daughter to stare out of the window like that and show so little interest in her lessons?" The father and mother nod. They hardly know what to say. Their daughter is simply like that. They've never known her any other way. The mother plucks up her courage and ventures a question in return. "Is she falling behind because of her dreaminess?" The teacher, whose mouth has now set into a grim line, looks at her and sighs. "No, her marks are good… that's not the problem." The mother has to bite her tongue, because then what on earth is the problem?
That girl was me.
'Time to Dream' — graphic print | drawing (edition of max. 10) | 37.5 × 27 cm | 2013
(…) The dream — whether it's a daydream or the surrender that happens every night — both kinds have always drawn me in, fascinated me, occupied me, and served beautifully as a way of escaping what I regularly find the colourlessness of my reality. Even as a little girl. Is it escapism? What exactly is a dream? Where do we go when we dream? Do we shape the landscape entirely ourselves, or is there something greater than our own imagination that has a part in it too?
According to Heraclitus, around 500 BC, those who are awake share one common world, while each sleeper turns away into a world of their own — in somewhat older wording, admittedly. For him the dream world was an inner world others had no access to, with no common ground. Schopenhauer saw it rather differently. He reasoned that life and dreams are pages of the same book. In the waking domain the book hangs together; in the dream we leaf through it.
Jung believed in a collective unconscious, and I can go a long way with him there. It's the thread running beneath the images I make and the stories I write. See also 'Junk-DNA', the backbone of all my work. That unconscious, that shared layer, is simply more abstract in form, made up of archetypes and a great deal of symbolism. The images called up in dreams act as metaphors: the wise old man, the shadow, birth, the journey, the mother, and so on. That makes dream interpretation a serious pursuit: people often come closer to themselves when they genuinely explore their dreams, but at the same time closer to their own kind, to the collective, to one another. Social Dreaming (Gordon Lawrence) is the practice in which people discuss their dreams together, and in doing so explore the heart of their culture, their community and the times they live in.
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote The Poetics of Reverie (1960), in which he distinguishes between the dream that takes place at night and the daydream, like that of the girl looking out of the window. At night, he argues, you aren't really present (though the lucid dream might be the exception). Reverie — musing, daydreaming — is different. You're half there, half not. There's a consciousness that watches along and enjoys. Reveries, for him, were not an escape but a source of poetry. That's a weight off my mind, because it means I'm allowed to see my escapism as moments of pure inspiration. And as an artist, that's exactly how I find it works. The best ideas come in those moments when the mind is free of rational thought and is simply allowed to go its own way, to make the journey towards the new concept that becomes the beginning of the next work or story.
Jung said something similar as early as 1912, in Symbols of Transformation. He distinguishes two ways of thinking: directed thinking — verbal, logical, adapted to reality, the thinking of the blackboard — and fantasy thinking, which works in images, associatively, dreamily. Jung didn't see that second kind as a deviation, a way of dodging reality, but as an older, equally legitimate form. The teacher at the front of the class was asking for the first, and the girl was doing the second. Insubordination, that's what it is ;-)
Sartre went a step further in The Imaginary (1940). For him, imagining is the capacity to picture something that is not there — and it is precisely that capacity that proves consciousness is free. Whoever can imagine is not locked inside what stands in front of them. When I wrote about the girl's inner freedom, a place no one else can reach, that is exactly the freedom Sartre theorises.
Worth knowing: Freud didn't invent the unconscious (you can't invent something like that, of course — at most you discover it, and he wasn't even the first to do that). Around 1700 Leibniz was already writing about petites perceptions: perceptions too small to become conscious but which still steer us, like the roar of the sea, made up of thousands of little waves you can't hear individually. The Romantics, such as Carus, saw the unconscious as the creative core of the soul, and in 1869 Eduard von Hartmann wrote an entire Philosophy of the Unconscious. Freud later turned it into a cellar full of repressed wishes. Jung dragged the whole thing back up out of the cellar and carried on in the line of the Romantics: the unconscious as a source, not a dumping ground.
In my living room, Jung's Red Book occupies rather a prominent place, so I can dip into it now and then. It's full of his visions and dreams, with drawings and paintings alongside. He called it active imagination (1913–1916): you let an image arise and then, awake, you enter into conversation with it. It's really exactly what I do when I write a story like Omaria, or make an image. It comes into being, and only then are the questions asked, the movements interpreted, and a listening ear given to what the image wants to say. Jung's book isn't the kind you read from front to back, but it gives wonderful impressions of imagination at its finest, and of the shared symbolism he believed was characteristic of dreams. It's also a way of putting yourself under the microscope; you can use it for what's known as shadow work. A deep dive into the unfathomable passages of your unconscious, into what moves you and what triggers you.
To come back to the girl at the window. She wasn't paying attention. No. Not to that lesson, perhaps — but that journey into the land of imagination did give her something. It gave me the freedom to create my own stories and to take them as seriously as the stories unfolding around us. Who says we should only dwell on what's tangible? Every story that plays out in your head holds a lesson, a fine insight. When I write, I always feel the story is handed to me, to a greater or lesser degree, as though somewhere a little hatch opens and shows me the way to the words. It might just be our collective unconscious, who knows. Fascinating, isn't it?