Category: Denise

(Saturday, June 21, 2014, Summer Solstice)  I’m participating in an outdoor art event. All the artwork must be created on site, in a green wooded area with open, grassy meadows. I’ve decided to make a life-size sculpture of a tree out of artist’s canvas. The canvas is too thick to easily stitch by hand so I am at my studio-mate Mary’s house, searching for a little hand-held sewing machine. I’m looking in her light-colored craft room. The walls are lined with white shelves and most of the stored items are office supplies, things one would use for graphic design, not for sculpture. Mary loves to sew, but I can’t find a sewing machine so I settle on a stapler and a few boxes of staples. I can also use the staples to simulate the texture of bark on the canvas.

I head out to the art event. The gallery head and lead juror is Fariba Bogzaran, the artist who won two top prizes at the dream conference. She is sitting at a large table in the grass. Just as at the conference, I cannot remember her name, which in the dream is something other than Fariba. I call her Sala. This makes her extremely exasperated and she waves me off to her assistant, whose name really is Sala.

Sala sits at a table across from Fariba. She greets me warmly. She gets up from her table and puts her right arm around my shoulders, leading me away from Fariba. She’s going to bring me out to the grassy field where I will be creating my sculpture.

I am very concerned about the manner in which I create and fasten the seams of my tree piece but not at all worried about filling it with stuffing. Will I use grass or leaves? Or will it remain empty, like an open channel?

Day notes:

Sala has two meanings: (1) a large hall or reception room; (2) an island

In real life, Fariba Bogzaran was Monica Del Bosque’s professor at JFK University. Sala in my dream is very much like Monica, both physically and emotionally. Monica was the gallery head at the dream conference. Ed Kellogg didn’t seem to think Fariba should have won the juror’s prize because, technically, her sculpture was not about a particular dream but was about the process of dreaming. Mythological.

(Friday, June 20, 2014)  A dream floats back to me while I rest quietly in bed this morning. It is a fragment, and it is all things.

In the middle of the blackness of the night, in the dreamtime, I have an experience of complete bliss. “I” am cradled in the center of a loving field of white light which dissolves me completely into its essence, its intelligence.

As my waking self retrieves the memory, I feel the skin over my heart and my fingertips tingle gently.

Day notes:

The morning Bonnie and I awoke at the bed & breakfast in Stinson Beach I had dream paralysis, common enough for me. The lucid dream of the paralysis contained both a huge explosion of white light and an image of Bonnie being attacked.

Cullan accepted the web developer job offer at Sleep Number today. He starts June 30. It sounds like a great company that will reward and care for him. As a mother I am overjoyed, relieved, grateful. Ecstatic!

Summer solstice entry from ‘365 Tao’ by Deng Ming-Dao: “When the true light appears, the entire planet turns to face it. The summer solstice is the time of greatest light. It is a day of enormous power. The whole planet is turned fully to the brilliance of the sun.”

(Friday, June 13, 2014)  Full moon last night. I dream of a basement filled with dozens of colorful sculptures that Cullan has created. They are absolutely delightful. They suspend from wooden rafters on strings and are the size of pinatas. But they are made from clay, not paper, and resemble the playful earthenware Mexican whistles I buy from Zinnia Folk Art in Minneapolis.

The sculptures are a kind of bank account. They grow in value over time. Chris has carefully vacuumed the wooden floor and wooden rafters of the room. It’s important to protect this artwork and to keep it meticulously clean to preserve its value. I consider wrapping each sculpture in a silk shroud but am satisfied, for now, that they are being properly cared for.

Day notes:

Bonnie and I met a man named Robert on the plane back from Berkeley. He is a self-taught computer wizard who has worked for NASA and Twitter. No degree. His obvious brilliance and financial success must have calmed my fears about Cullan, who also has no degree but is quite a clever young man in his own right.