"If there is anything about which we feel sure, it is that the world we experience is real. We can see, touch and hear it. We can lift heavy and solid objects; hurt ourselves, if we're not careful, against their unyielding immobility. It seems undeniable that out there, around us, independent and apart from us, stands a physical world, utterly real, solid and tangible. But all is not what it seems."
--Peter Russell
(Note: This is Part Two of my Levels of Abstraction essay. In Part One, I used the steps in the seeing and photographing processes to work through the levels of abstraction. In this second part, I take it to another level of abstraction that is sometimes the subject matter of abstract photography: dreams.)
Most of us have seen a photograph that has a "dream-like quality," but what exactly does that mean? How do you capture a dream in a photograph? I guess the first step is to try to understand what exactly a dream is.
It's an age-old question: what do dreams mean? But whether you take a Freudian "tell me about your mother" view, or you think dreams are just random thoughts produced by an idle brain, everyone agrees that dreams aren't real. But compared to what we call "reality", dreams may in fact be not that different.
A couple years ago I found an enlightening document linked to from a web site. Titled simply "Reality" and by an unknown author, some recent searching on the Internet leads me to believe that the document was apparently cobbled from Peter Russell’s work, mainly from his book "From Science to God". I think the two primary sources for the document posted on the web site were this and this. It's interesting reading, regardless of how much you want to believe, but I wanted to pull out one quote specifically related to dreams:
"The world we experience around us is no more 'out there' than are our dreams. However real it may seem, it is, in the final analysis, all in the mind. We never experience the physical world directly; all we ever know is the image of the world generated in our awareness. And that image is no more 'out there' than are the images of our dreams."
Lucid Dreaming
"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."
--Thoreau
Photographer Steven Fibonacci had been telling me for some time that I needed to see the movie "Waking Life", and I finally watched it a couple weeks ago. Fibonacci has been my foil for parts of this "levels of abstraction" thought process; it's great to have a friend to bounce certain ideas off of. First, let me say "Waking Life" is a cool movie. From a pure photography standpoint, they filmed it pretty low-budget with a DV camera, then edited it together...but they didn't release it like that. They just used that "completed film" as a base layer, on top of which they digitally animated the entire movie. As a fan of animation, I was immediately captivated by it; it's unlike anything I've ever seen before.
It's a fairly heavy movie, with little action but lots of talking and philosophizing, all revolving around dreams vs. reality, exploring many concepts such as the merging of dreams and reality, what death really is, etc. But the core concept presented in this movie is the lucid dream. A lot of thought went into this movie (it's no Hollywood chick flick, that's for sure) and watching it you'll either love or hate the philosophizing, not to mention that you'll either love or hate the animation.
This movie did a lot for me just by introducing me to the concept of lucid dreaming; actually by giving a name to something I've been experiencing for the last 5 or 6 years. A so-called "lucid dream" is a dream where the dreamer becomes aware that he or she is dreaming. In "Waking Life", dreamers become aware they are in dreams because one of two things happens: they flip light switches off but the lights stay on, or they try to read digital clocks or fine text and it appears as gibberish. I first started becoming lucid in dreams where things would happen that were not logical/not physically possible, and I deduced that I must be dreaming. Recently, I had the experience in a dream where I picked up a movie that had come in the mail from Netflix, and read the title; it was a combination of the titles from two well-known movies, and didn't make any sense, so I immediately determined that I was dreaming.
Apparently there are more advanced states of lucid dreaming, where once you determine you are dreaming, you do things to change the direction of the dream (as opposed to "normal" dreams, the subject matter of which you have no control over; the type where you wake up and say "why the hell would I dream something like THAT????"). Advanced states of lucid dreaming begin to blur the line between reality and dreams, and to the average person this is getting into way-out "fruitcake" territory. But again, let me repeat:
"The world we experience around us is no more 'out there' than are our dreams."
Dreams as Art; Art as Dreams
What about art as a means of expressing dreams? Not the lame, pseudo-hip, comically amateurish photographs of people dressed in bad Halloween costumes holding a feather in each hand and balancing a dead chicken on their heads and such; but photographs that have a so-called "dream-like quality" to them. This likely varies widely from person to person, but when I think "photographs with a dream-like quality" I gravitate towards the pinhole work of Martha Casanave or the work of Larry Wiese.
"My photographs are metaphorical, they are from my imagination."
--Larry Wiese
The difference between documentary photography and fine art photography is that the former channels images, while the later channels emotions. Put another way: a good documentary photograph makes someone say "I like that image because the subject makes me feel good", while a good fine art photograph (hopefully) makes someone say "that image makes me feel good". The feeling is disengaged from the subject. Nowhere is this more true than in abstract photography, where the subject is purposefully unrecognizable, forcing the viewer to have feelings based only on the color, form, and texture of the image.
I started out thinking that dreams and abstract photographs were one or two steps further away from "truth" than what we call "reality" is. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe their value lies in stripping away some of the layers, and they in fact get us closer than ever to "truth".
[ photographs above: Pomona, 2005 ]
