Dreaming Wide Awake
We live, while we see the sun,
Where life and dreams are as one;
And living has taught me this,
Man dreams the life that is his,
Until his living is done.
Segismundo’s monologue in Life is a Dream by Calderon de la Barca explores the belief that we live in some kind of virtual reality state. The same concept was presented in The Matrix movies. We are living in one state dreaming the state we think we are living. It sounds like Inception too: a dream within a dream, within a dream. Flash back to Alice in Wonderland as well. Reverie is a dream state, but it doesn’t have to bring only ethereal consequences. You have the capacity through symbolic interpretation to dream wide awake and achieve earthly results.
A similar take is presented in Animal Dreams, a book by Barbara Kingsolver. The dog is sleeping and making sudden movements while apparently dreaming. Curiosity leads to infer in what is the dog dreaming about. According to the characters in the book, the dog dreams about the things he did that day. If we as humans dream about only the things we did that day we are no different. We would only have animal dreams.
Erwin Raphael McManus brings the other side of the coin to exploration in the book Wide Awake. McManus described the potential we all have to turn our lives in an adventure in which we live our dreams and see them as goals and motivators to thrive. We can dream with our eyes open. We can use our God-given talents and imagination to create a future in which we can give purpose to our existence.
Maybe our dreams are also given by God. The story of Joseph shows that no matter how bad things look now, those dreams we had are yet to pass. We are not only dreaming about the past but also about the future. He went to a lot of difficult situations but was faithful and his dreams came alive. There is a plan in a future we are yet to discover in which we fit and participate actively turning our lives in an adventure.
Never stop dreaming. Living in a dream state is not a bad thing. Certainly, we all need to sleep and it is possible that we dream in our sleep. However, dreaming wide awake create life, beauty, and change. Art, music, architecture, technology innovations, inventions that facilitate our daily endeavors, all of it is a product of the imagination of some who refused to stop dreaming.
To be honest, the first thing that came to my mind was that song. Yes, you know which one. You are singing it in your head right now. Let’s go back in time for a moment. “Here I go again” from Whitesnake… Go ahead, sing along!
“Here comes that dreamer”… I believe in dreams. Dreams give us hope and aspirations. Artists know everything about dreams. It seems like as artists we are constantly living in one. It is common to come across people who say: “You are dreaming if you think you can make it as an artist.” I hear that a lot but my favorite one is: “What else do you do besides art?” Have you heard that before? Have you said that to someone?
The Journey of the Creative Mind
The Artist at Work
Art looks like a destination. Art looks like a journey. Art looks like both. There are many physical processes involved in the creation of art. The eyes, the hands, and body movements combine to develop what can be called ‘technique’. Technique is connected to the non-physical world of the mind. What are we thinking when we create? That is considering the premise that we need to be actively thinking in order to exist according to René Descartes’ “je pense, donc je suis” (I think, therefore I am). What are we feeling? Considering that we are also emotional beings and feelings are our connection to a physical world. What are the antecedents that provoke those things? That is accepting that we are influenced by something or someone triggering thoughts, feelings or ideas that are now materializing in our art. Are there ‘energies’ outside the physical brain motivating creativity? That is the concept of the ancient Greeks’ muses and the conception that inspiration comes from outside of us.
Humans are always trying to explain abstract ideas in a ‘concrete’ manner even though language itself is an abstraction. Moreover, I believe writing is not a way of making the idea concrete but a visual way to make it abstract. The idea becomes a sound and the sound received visual symbols we call ‘letters’ which consequently forms an alphabet. We form words with them providing a visualization of the idea. Cognitive psychology attempts to explain this phenomena. In instructional design we pay attention to learning concepts that help us design learning activities. Concepts as making sense, consciousness, perception, reflection, intention, action, and so on. Psychoanalysis, made famous by Sigmund Freud, explores what I am going to call ‘the dark side of the moon’. In psychoanalysis the focus is on what happens in a conscious state but in the unconscious mind. Concepts like subliminal messages, dreams, suppressed memories, instincts, and other factors that connects us to the conscious world with an unconscious root. Think of Salvador Dalí and surrealism.
We can try to explain or map the journey of the creative mind and we will always fall short of explaining its full ‘reality’. We can take a piece of art as a destination and trace back the steps to the beginning of time in an attempt to explain creativity by its result. I will argue that the artwork is not the result or the destination of the creative mind more mostly a souvenir from the trip like that card, t-shirt, or the famous coffee mug we get as a memory. Creativity is much more powerful than its result. There might be more happening in the subconscious mind than what is happening in the conscious mind when art is created. The journey of the creative mind is not to be fully explained or understood but to be enjoyed and experienced. It is what we talk about to entertain ourselves with the possibilities and not to prove a point. We just enjoy the trip, the memories, and the souvenirs.