Are your night-time dreams filled with secret messages? Mine are. Except I don’t usually know what my dreams are trying to tell me, so I write down every detail of what happened in the dream and put the narrative aside to decode later. Sometimes it takes me hours upon awakening to chronicle all my dreams. If I have an early-morning engagement (coffee date, job, meeting), I carry a notebook and make lots of trips to the bathroom to jot stuff down stuff I might not remember later. I even index the dreams on the back cover of my journal (a prehistoric version of hashtagging) and note the page numbers so I can revisit the dreams in the future. Most of my dreams are nonsensical (“brain farts,” as an acquaintance of mine once called them), but sometimes they’re good little stories which seem like advice I’m giving myself.
I had a great dream last week, and I’ve decided to share it with you, since listening to other people’s dreams is almost as exciting as getting gas for your car or eating all the vegetables in your refrigerator before they rot.
As the curtain rose on my dream, I found myself at a meeting of visual artists. I only knew three of the artists in the dream; the rest were strangers. Our meeting took place in one of the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum, for no reason I can fathom except we had a window view of cheerful greenery instead of the gray, frozen tundra invading my world right now. Two of my artist friends were extras without much to say for themselves. The third artist sat on a chair at the front of the group delivering an informal talk about her paintings. (In real life I highly admire this painter and respect her skill, integrity and brilliance.)
The brilliant, skillful painter lectured the audience about her work habits. “Instead of approaching my easel like it’s my date on a drunken Saturday night,” she said, “I use my time in the studio seriously and act like a real professional.”
Let us all now follow her advice and stop fooling around.