Susan Budd - Blog

Dreaming in Color

6/9/2016

I have often heard it said that we dream in black-and-white, not in color. I have often heard it said. But I don’t believe it. Not remembering color is not the same as not dreaming in color. Perhaps we do dream in color and we just don’t remember.

Even when I remember a dream clearly, I rarely have any memory of color. There are times when I’m certain about what color something was, but I can’t say with certainty that I saw the color, just that I remember that something was a particular color. Yet once I awoke with a vivid memory of beautiful bright colors. Once indeed I saw color. I call it my “cosmic vision.”

Cosmic Vision--

Evening. On a large patio overlooking a backyard is a festive family gathering ~ food, laughter, mingling. I’m alone at the end of the patio looking at the night sky.

It should be dark, but instead the sky is vibrant with pink and violet and every shade in between, each dazzling shade coming into being and passing away ~ a wash of colors, blending, eddying and pooling like liquid, like pink magma, like molten amethyst.

As I marvel at the beauty of the colors, the sky becomes vast, cosmically vast, the colors more brilliant than any I have seen while awake.

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Art and Dreams

2/19/2016

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In the most general sense, dream language is like art. It is a symbolic language, whether simple or subtle, mundane or mysterious. Some dreams are like abstract paintings ~ a wash of colors perhaps, or a tangle of wordless thoughts and impressions. Some are surreal, teeming with bizarre imagery and logical paradox. Some blur the boundary between reality and dream ~ so real do they seem. The dream poems in Visions are like verbal-paintings ~ full of the sublime, the fantastic, the grotesque.

But Visions is influenced by art in a specific sense as well. The centerpiece of the book, “The Dreamer,” describes a painting by Frederick Arthur Bridgman called “The Siesta.” It is both the most philosophical and the most pictorial poem in the book. In Bridgman’s luxurious painting, an odalisque reclines in sensuous indolence. Sweetly dreaming, she is poised between this world and the world of imagination. “She is both dreamer and dream” (p. 35).

Throughout Visions there are allusions to other artists and works of art. Besides “The Siesta,” two paintings are featured in poems ~ Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” and Paul Gauguin’s “The Day of God.” Like “The Siesta,” both are set in exotic locations and both depict scenes of repose. In “The Dream,” a woman reclines on her sofa deep in the lush African jungle. In “The Day of God,” Tahitians lounge in a tropical paradise.

Like dreams, these paintings present moments outside of time, eternal moments that neither begin nor end, that ever alternate between the real and surreal.

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Mythopoeic Visionaries

1/14/2016

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There are three poets who inspire me ~ three mythopoeic visionaries who saw beyond the world of appearances.

First there is William Blake. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” That’s Blake. He was a great painter and poet. He had visions and his prophetic poetry reveals what he glimpsed through those cleansed doors.

Then there is the sublime dream poetry of Dante and Novalis. The Divine Comedy is one of the most magnificent epic poems in world literature. It is Dante’s dream journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Novalis was the young German poet who wrote the dream of the blue flower ~ the mystic symbol of longing for heavenly bliss.

Blake, Dante, Novalis ~ three mythopoeic visionaries. I consider them all philosopher-poets.

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Visionary Story-Poems

12/2/2015

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Visions is about the worlds we inhabit in our dream lives. Each of the characters in Visions experiences a metamorphosis, epiphany, or reverie. Each traverses a dreamscape of his or her own ~ dreamscapes created by the characters’ minds. In the primary sequence of story-poems, a blind artist is driven to madness by dreams of light and color. In another sequence, a melancholy woman visits an art museum and awakens to a life of beauty, color, and sensuality. In yet another, an orphaned child finds enlightenment in a chapel illuminated by stained glass windows.

The story-poems in Visions blur the distinction between fiction and poetry. I don’t call them narrative poems since many of them are not narratives at all. Some are, but others are purely descriptive or impressionistic. And the stories they tell are too surreal and dreamlike to be considered traditional narratives. But they all tell stories in a poetic language that is aesthetically luxurious ~ a language that evokes the fantastic and mythical realms of dream, madness, and vision.

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Why do I call myself a Philosopher-Poet?

11/8/2015

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I’ve been a professor of philosophy and the humanities for over thirty years and I write poetry and poetic fables. Thus ~ philosopher-poet. But that answer barely skims the surface.

If I had to sum myself up in three words, it would be these: I explore consciousness. When I was a child I posed metaphysical questions ~ though I didn’t know what metaphysics was. By the time I went to college, I had discovered philosophy. I learned quite a lot, but I realized that philosophy was not enough. It was not the end of my exploration. It was only the beginning.

To explore consciousness, I had to study the irrational as well as the rational. I had to study dreams, visions, fantasies, and all species of numinous experience. And I had to give voice to these ineffable experiences. I had to express the inexpressible and describe the indescribable. To do this, I had to abandon linear narrative, realism, conventional language. I needed a primal or mythic language ~ the language of poetry and fable.

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Dreaming in Color

Art and Dreams

Mythopoeic Visionaries

Visionary Story-Poems

Why do I call myself a Philosopher-Poet?

Art, Dreams, and the Mythopoeic Mind