This video is about the stepping into the unknown, it is about surrender to the creative process and the wisdom of dreams. FREE DOWNLOAD Voicings from UnderGround Book This part-memoir, part-liner notes, part-treatise on the creative process was designed for those curious about the internal laboratory of the creative mind and artists of all persuasions.
THE HOUSE OF DREAMING
I am at a pool party when a tear opens up in the fabric of the world. Then, all around me I sense and feel the tall, luminous shapes of beings whose tendrilly extentions radiate outward like moonlight on restless water. I am drawn to them and their attention is trained on me as I walk through the tear in the world and fnd myself in an enchanting, high- ceilinged victorian-era room. The room is softly aglow, yet its generous windows are boarded up or flled with concrete blocks. Scrawled in red across the boards and cement are the words NO. NO. NO. The presences evaporate and I am alone.
I am vexed. Who vandalized this place?
The dream arrived as I worked to complete this portfolio in April of 2018. It is of a different quality than the frequent and familiar dreams that echo and elaborate upon the experiences of my waking life. I have a sense of having been visited– and of having received a message.
I re-enter the dream through a technique known as Active Imagination. I stand in the NO room again in a lucid waking-state, and articulate my wish to clarify the symbolic import of it, and suddenly know that it was I who scrawled the red NOs. I bricked and boarded the windows. I begin to understand that the room had been a place of meeting and exchange between myself and the luminous beings, but that as time passed, I said no more and more frequently to their communications. Finally, I ignored them altogether, denying the many small evidences of their invitations.
I wrote NO. NO. NO. across the windows of that sanctuary, because I thought it was making me late for the world: too slow and too soft and too uncertain.
I invite the luminous beings to return. I tell them I would like to open up the windows and repaint the walls, but that I need their assistance. This is a spirit house, a room of collaboration. At frst I hear nothing. The room remains empty. So, I decide to clear away some of the debris. I use a sledge hammer to break the cement in one frame. When I have made an opening, I lean though into a vast blue sky and fresh, sharp air. If this is my tower, I have found its view.
I go to the second window and break through its NO. Here is a dirt wall. I start to chip away at it. Stone and clay and rocks–it is very dense–but behind this is softness like a living body. I touch it, this great, soft, abstract animal, and it is my own body that I feel.
There is a third window: bricked over. I break my way through and there is a sunny meadow. The room around me begins to soften, its edges curving and expanding outward. Pillars rise up from the floor....
I daydream about opening a napping house with gauzy curtains, diaphanous music and countless beds...
This is a dreaming house. One vivid image is all it takes for a dreamer to awaken into unguessed possibility. The key to the house, its chambers, its gardens and cellars, lies buried within patient collusion with that strange, subtle radiance that tugs at the corners of attention: Here is a seam, the outline of a gateway, a passage that sometimes, leads into an other dimention. And this parallel universe may be so subtle, that the most radical act is simply to recognize that you have passed through the dreaming house and emerged somewhere else.
In the rooms of the dreaming house are tools for countless journeys, and always there is a frame amongst them. This, the dreamer places, and then peers through, as like to a lens. Here is a glistening trail. Follow it into places of reverie: places for sitting still as a glacial boulder with ears like copper trumpets, places for swimming and floating and others for spinning and mad ricochet off the mores of convention. Here in the tangle of yes-rooms are invitations that lead further and ever deeper; to antechambers and quiet thresholds that open again into tunnels that descend like the gullets of wild geese, dropping away swiftly into what is yet or ever undecided. The guinea feathers, the robin's egg, the tentative shadow, these chthonic fragments embedded like gems in rough stone, lead ever into.
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