Commissions From the Beyond
Slideshow:
The ability to see objects’ properties independently of their surroundings, such as recognizing parallel lines among a series of near-parallel lines, may be a function of the corpus callosum. This painting hung on a gallery wall in a dream. It had won a prize – seventeen dollars. In a lucid dream this tree fern was modeling for me, changing poses with its fronds by my telepathic cue, while I memorized the poses to paint later. I cued the treefern to change its fronds into feathers. It began to do so, but just then some people entered the scene and the tree fern, protective of its magical powers, ceased its frond-to-feather mutation. On a road in a dream I came upon this scene while escaping through the woods from a prison camp. Uphill among the trees women worked in sweatshops; downhill was the prison. After hours of insomnia, while transitioning into REM sleep, part of my mind was still conscious, as another part was beginning to dream, so I watched hypnagogic images coalescing from flashes of light and colorful swirls, changing into representational forms, and dissipating back into colors and swirls. In a dream, my landlord and I walked through these ruins looking for a comfortable place to sit and visit. The caretaker of a saltwater(?) aquarium was refilling the tank and forgot, or didn’t care, that he had already added (salt) to the water, and added some more. The fish, sensing that they were now poisoned and doomed, began to indiscriminately eat each other whole. Some were eating fish so large that they died in the process. I reached in and poked the back of a large pudgy fish, so it regurgitated another fish it had nearly swallowed. One small fish was hiding in a crevice under a rock, knowing it would soon die of contaminated water, or be eaten. I added fresh water to the tank to dilute the poison, though probably too late. I don’t remember the rest of the dream, just this hypnopompic image right before waking up. In this dream the water was amazingly clear. In a dream, the world had become so crowded that many people had no space in which to move around. When the tide went out they moved about on the beach, going about their business, enjoying that part of their lives. When the tide came in they moved uphill, back into the town, and again there was standing room only. 
I dreamed I had brought several items and small animals back from Bolivia. After most of them had rolled or scampered off into the landscape, an egg remained and was starting to hatch. One each of many different bird species had come, as if emissaries, to witness the emergence of this new species of bird. A fleeting vision Here’s a vision I saw once inside my eyelids. In a dream a hole had been cut into the ceiling of my studio – a grave that opened to the outside, as if I were underground. Friends and family dropped earth and flowers into the grave, not seeming to notice my studio below. 
A Shabti inside a glass-covered display table at a friend’s house seemed to channel this vision of Egypt into my dream as I napped next to it.
Ann Erpino Fine Art 