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DREAMING . . .

ART & ORGANISM:. DREAMING. Sleeping Gypsy” by Henri Rousseau, 1897. ART & ORGANISM:. DREAMING. Henri Rousseau. GREAT DREAMS.

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DREAMING . . .

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  1. ART & ORGANISM: DREAMING . . . Sleeping Gypsy” by Henri Rousseau, 1897.

  2. ART & ORGANISM: DREAMING . . . Henri Rousseau

  3. GREAT DREAMS

  4. Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people’s injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King Speech at Civil Rights March in Washington 28 Aug. 1963

  5. WORK? If we work we cannot dream, and wisdom comes in dreams. You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my Mother's breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.

  6. . You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like Whitemen. But how dare I cut my Mother's hair! It is a BAD law and I CANNOT obey it. I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. We must wait here in the house of our Fathers and be ready to meet them in the body of our Mother. from SMOLHALLA, the Chief of the Great Basin tribe of Nez Percé who founded the Dreamer Religion

  7. Our life is two-fold: Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being; They become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity; They pass like spirits of the past, --they speak like Sibyls of the future: they have power-- The tyranny of pleasure and pain; They make us what we were not --what they will, And shake us with the vision that's gone by, The dread of vanish'd shadows--Are they so? Is not the past all shadow? --What are they? Creations of the mind? The mind can make substance, and people planets of its own with beings brighter than we have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. Byron

  8. I used to fly . . . • “I stopped myself . . . And never flew again. I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Chuang-Tzu

  9. IS a DREAM a STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS?

  10. The STRESS RESPONSE prepares the organism for STRSSORS (challenges to meeting more-or-less urgent NEEDS): it includes enhanced sensory input, and cognitive processing of data

  11. Evidence thatDreams begin in the brain parietal lobe injury: dreaming may cease, midfrontal fracture: possible inability to "visualize", surgical cingulectomy: vivid dreaming while awake, temporal lobe lesions (as well as drugs such as Librium)can cause vivid dreaming.

  12. STROOP TEST GreenRedBlue BluePurpleRed GreenPurpleGreen

  13. CONFLICT is not CATASTROPHE Conflict “is our call to evolve. It challenges us to look beyond our current views to an expanded reality.” EM Forster EM Forster

  14. A NEGOTIATED PEACE, A “POLITICAL SOLUTION” Our ancestors (bless them) are always there, reflected in our instincts and impulses, held in check by our thin veil of prefrontal cortex … seething energy suppressed by the hopeful “organ of civilization.” (Luria) We are in uneasy alliance with these barely domesticated beasts within… we “reason” with them…

  15. BUT how can you reason with “instincts … eternally hostile and detrimental to reason … whatever belongs to the sphere of sensuousness, pleasure, impulse has the connotation of being antagonistic to reason … something that has to be subjugated, constrained." Marcuse, Eros and Instinct, 1955:145

  16. Most of them are seen as beasts … like ancestral creatures ruled by raw instinct and rabid self-interest Pitted in a “war of all against all”(Hobbes)

  17. Goya, responding to the horrors of the prolonged and progressively brutal Napoleonic war in Spain: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters Goya, Capricos (1799) (from Los Caprichios by Francisco Goya plate 43, 1799)

  18. Reason . . . But humans possess an “organ of civilization” (Luria) – The PREFRONTAL CORTEX which can (in principle) CONTROL the PASSIONS “Castle in the Pyrenees” by Rene Magritte, 1961

  19. But there is a bridge From Higher and lower referential processes Consciousness and subconsciousness And we are creative in proportion to its traffic

  20. Jacob’s Ladder In Jacob’s dream, the angels ascending and descending the ladder symbolize the ease with which dreamers can move between levels of reality The dream ladder bridges from one world to another From the Lambeth Bible, 12th c England

  21. Jacob’s Ladder

  22. Truth and Reality • Exactness is not the truth (Matisse) • "Art is a lie I use to tell the truth" (Picasso) • The truth is more important than the facts (Frank Lloyd Wright) • “These things never happened, but are always” (Sallust) • "Is there anything truer than truth? Yes, Legend." (Kazantzakis)

  23. The CORPOREALIZATION of the PSYCHE:Is ART a DREAM made REAL? Andre Breton: only ART makes us FREE. Because only art can tell us about the possibilities of the world, alternative futures we would not have otherwise imagined. It is MORE REAL that REALITY! It is SUR-REALITY! Surrealist Manifesto

  24. The brain . . . Some famous images are artifacts of the brain in flux. (dying brains image a tunnel of light) “Ascent of the Blessed” by Hieronymus Bosch

  25. REM and dreaming Four kinds of neurons are represented: MRF: midbrain reticular neurons project tonic & phasic signals to thalamus PGO: peribrachial region convey phasic activation to geniculate and cortex PRF: pontine reticular formation convey phasic activation to oculomotor neurons and spinal cord (eye movements, twitches, BRF: bulbar reticular formation neurons; blocks sensory input and motor output at spinal level JA Hobson, The Dreaming Brain, 1988

  26. REM and dreaming Systems model: Cessation of aminergic inhibition activates reticular formation RF activates cortex and also informs it of REMs it causes JA Hobson, The Dreaming Brain, 1988

  27. Models of meaning Unconscious wishes and recent experience instigate dream Chaotic data integrated but in absence external reference information JA Hobson, The Dreaming Brain 1988

  28. COHERENCE • Dreams are made of isolated fragments and are apprehended only when conjoined in some approximation of coherence: Such tableaux, once "...begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of the occasion” are all we can recall of the world beyond the present instant, overdue to be a tableaux itself.

  29. Is LIFE less real than DREAMS? Muhammad: "People sleep, and when they die they wake." Calderon: All life is a dream, And dreams themselves--O mockery--Are nothing but a dream Hermes: "Just as dreams are unreal in comparison with the things seen in waking life, even so the things seen in waking life in this world are unreal in comparison with the thought-world, which alone is truly real." Chaung-Tse: "...only when they awake do they know it was a dream. By and by comes the Great Awakening, and then they find out that this life is really a great dream."

  30. The CORPOREALIZATION of the PSYCHE:Is ART a DREAM made REAL? Andre Breton: only ART makes us FREE. Because only art can tell us about the possibilities of the world, alternative futures we would not have otherwise imagined. It is MORE REAL that REALITY! It is SUR-REALITY! Surrealist Manifesto

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