Mountain Dream Drawing
In my dreams last night, the vivid last dream before waking, I am preparing to take off for the mountains; it’ll be cold, and I’ll be camping; my truck is all packed, I'm just trying to get away; people delay me with chores and chat, and slow down my progress; I take a wrong turn at the exit ramp for the highway into the mountains; so I pull off where I can get turned around, get gas and get going; I have a good chat with a park ranger overseer at the station who’s an old woman, practical and down to earth; eventually I find a gas station and get back on the two-lane that goes up the grade to the high peaks, up over a curving bridge and onto the climbing road.
I say I'm going to the Tetons, in my dream, but the mountains I'm going to are parked much higher up, like in the Colorado Front Range, towards Rocky Mountain National Park, a patch of white-capped jagged peaks at the top of a spine of mountain ranges.
I've had recurring dreams of being in the mountains; of going up, and coming down; of camping, hiking, traveling, driving. A recurring dream of being in a small city in a valley at the base of some very high mountains, then going up through a long valley which gets steeper and steeper till I arrive at a cirque valley hanging above the world; you can stand at the mouth of the valley and see forever, the air very thin and cold and bracing. When I was studying geology in the Tetons, age 18, we climbed up to one of the high cirque valleys, at the top of which was an active glacier, and looking east across Jackson Hole, and on into the Gros Ventre range, you really did feel like you could see forever. Maybe these mountains are the high mountains of my dreams, that I’ve been to in more than one dream, over the years, very high up, very isolated, exquisitely beautiful.
Labels: brush pens, drawing, dreams, mountains, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 3:15 PM
2 Comments:
This is a beautiful dream here, Art, and beautifully rendered both in your words and through your illustrations.
If you like writing up your dreams and if you enjoy sharing them you might like to go to the Annandale Dream Gazette, and send them on via Lynn Behrendt: http://annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/.
It's great place to post dreams alongside a number of other poets, writers and whoever else is interested to share a record of their dreams.
I for one love to read about dreams, but I know there are many who find them boring. Why I can't imagine.
To me dreams are 'the royal road to the unconscious', to borrow Freud's famous expression.
Thanks, Elisabeth. I'll look into that.
For me the interesting thing here was the dream symbol that lead to the art-making.
I do mine my dreams for creative ideas, images, scenarios, poems, and archetypes. I don't think people realize just many poems of mine have been records of dreams and/or visions. Ditto the visual art.
I keep most of them to my self, though: giving too much away, it becomes deprived of its power. Some experiences it's necessary to keep secret, as it were, or they become dissipated.
I'll look into that venue, but I admit up front that I'm wary of it. One nasty shadow habit that I'm aware of in myself, that I have to be on guard against, is a tendency to write to please others; in other words, in many such writing venues, I've noticed in the past a tendency I have to write to please the rest of the gang, and that skews and eventually poisons my creative well. It's no one's bad habit but my own, and no one is to blame; nonetheless I have learned to be very cautious about which sort of venues I share things in.
I do mention my dreams, here, from time to time, in the context of how they can be mined for creativity. I hesitate to reveal more than that so publicly.
Thanks again for the suggestion, regardless.
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