Dreamspeak: Under the Override

There’s a great scene in Osmosis Jones, a semi-animated flick about the insides of zookeeper Frank Detomello’s (Bill Murray) body, when a serious virus hits “City of Frank.” Instead of going to see a doctor, he pops a flu pill saying, “Sick? I’m not getting sick! I have far too much planned.” Meanwhile, down in [...]

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Dream Interpretation Machine

For inspiration this week, I want to share an amazing digital art project called Dreamlines.  It is a self-proclaimed Dream Interpretation Machine which, once you enter the keywords of your dream, searches the Internet for related images and generates a perpetual painting in motion from them.  It is, as the artist Leonardo Solaas writes, analogous [...]

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Dreamspeak: Theatre of Dreams

Understanding a dream is not so different from interpreting a film or piece of literature. Some even say the structure of these art forms, storytelling itself, emulates dreaming. If it is a good quality work, there are no mistakes in how, when and where things are placed. Just like a play, every dream [...]

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Dreamspeak: Grist for the psychic mill

Dear Toko-pa; I dream a couple brings their two sons to a new place, from the east coast to the west coast. Here, the littler boy is happier. He is more sensitive and says he likes being in a place where he is good at things. The landscape and what it offers [...]

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Dreamspeak: Tiny Acorn; Mighty Oak

A friend recently asked me if there was any danger of tainting one’s dreaming by becoming more active with it…as if bringing one’s designs into an otherwise pristine province might cause it to spoil. I found myself responding with a question; do you influence your own reality, or does it unfold autonomously? As [...]

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Dreamspeak: Dream It Forward

With science, we strip things down to get at their heart. With dreaming, we are as shaman-writer Martin Prechtel describes, adding layers to the bulk of our soul by remembering. He is not speaking simply of remembering stories that are passed down through generations, but of a much further memory than that.
Every [...]

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Bleed Joyfully – A Fresh View of Depression

“My mother slept with an axe under her pillow,” one woman recounts in a plaintive voice, “We lived in terror that my father would return to murder us in the night. For some reason, I don’t know why, but I was always expected to be happy.”
Inside a recent video installation at the Power Plant Gallery [...]

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Dreamspeak: Playful genius

I dream of a wise little girl. I’m very drawn to her but am interrupted by her father arriving before we can connect. He is urgent, speaking another language. He is difficult to understand and stressed out. He has crumbs all over his hands. I am asked to tell stories [...]

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A Terrible Beauty

“This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern…in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so–I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design,” reads The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1899).
Over a century later, Gilman’s classic [...]

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Madness or Divine Revelation?

Art Review – Javier Téllez
The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto
“My mother slept with an axe under her pillow. We lived in terror that my father would return to murder us in the night.
For some reason, I was always expected to be happy.” It is the unmistakable voice of agency that we hear in Javier Téllez’s video [...]

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