A little explanation on Oneiric Art

Art has been always the domain of the soul. Even the most rationalistic art is driven by the profound motivations, meanings and expresive needs of its author. I have learned that we can read, to some degree, the drives of every artist by studing his artworks, even if he didn't try consciously to show his most intimate values to the world... they unavoidably leak through the creative movement of his mind.

We understand this, more precisely, when we get into the psychological proposal known as “inner work”. Along imaginative procedures we activate our creativity and let our minds to walk freely, to give out their own stories with no preconceived direction or intention (as always happens in dreams). Yet, at later analysis, we may invariably see that those stories speak out clearly the specific psychological challenges that the person is facing in his live.

These practices show the movement of our unconscious, a realm of the human psyche that keeps all the meanings that lead our actions and decisions, even if we are not aware of its processes.

So, in this sense, every form of art is, at some level, oneiric, as it sprouts from the psychic dynamics of the unconscious world (which is the same world of dreams). But it is different to experience these processes unconsciously than to knowingly take part on them, harvesting their benefits for a willful use in our lives.

That's what we, oneiric artists, practice in our daily live. We consciously grab the products of our unconscious worlds and materialize them in artworks for the sake of our affairs: to get inspiration for our cultural job, to embellish our lives, to explore deep meanings that could bring solutions and wisdom for us, our loved ones and our communities... A very shamanic use, or more precisely a proto-shamanic one.

As you may see in my following example, the value of the matter doesn't lie in the used technique or in the skills of the maker. This is art for the art. We care here more about feelings and meanings, than about the attractiveness of the outcomes. Its therapeutic worth is more important for us than its comercial value.

Of course, if you plan to transform some of your oneiric images in high-quality artworks for sell or to get attention (very respectable goals), you will need to develop your artistic abilities to be able to create awesome, complex, gorgeous products. I want to encourage every person towards that learning, as the artistic adventure is one of the most meaningful and fulfilling experiences in the human life. But I want to make clear that it is not strictly necessary, in order to gather all the fruits of our souls by practicing oneiric art.

The Spirits' Tower

I made this simple artwork by those processes, some years ago. I went to sleep and saw this strange scene in the hypnagogic state: the in-between stage in the sleeping process, when you are about to enter a deeper state of mind but haven't lost yet your waking consciousness. We, oneironauts, often call that stage the bridge, because it is a transition between the waking and the dream worlds.

As I was still awake, I did a soft effort to capture in my memory the main traits of the vision, by briefly describing them and verbally repeating several times. It was like:

Ok, now get it: High black tower, made of round holes; warm colours at the background sky, red and yellow clouds... High black tower, round holes...

You will find that it is not necessary to be exhaustive in that description. It works as a note in your agenda, a simple reminder: you describe the general and most important traits and your mind will vividly remember the whole stuff later.

Also it's interesting that, by doing that light effort in that particular state, your mind tends to call about it strongly in your waking state. That gives another point to the assertion that the best memory practices must involve a relaxing state. In coming posts I will talk about those immensely beneficial memory practices.

Later I wrote down those descriptions and started to draw a fast soft sketch. I used watercolours on it (just black, red and yellow) and let it to dry out. Next I digitized it and started to play with it in Gimp, and finally arrived to a definite version.

Communicating with meanings

Some time after my creative process I showed the picture to several friends, individually. I wanted to receive their opinions about what meanings the image portrayed to them. It's like a psychological game, where people explain the feelings and meanings they get from a drawing.

All my friends expressed invariably some meanings that were strongly related to my own feelings about the dream and the vision. And all those meanings were immensely important in my inner life, to my existential requirements and to the specific constitution of my psyche.

So, as I said, this powerful and healthy artistic practice is more about the meanings than about the technical quality of the outcomes.

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A final note: You may reform the shapes and traits of the vision, as part of the subsequent artistic process. It's not a problem nor a perversion of its meanings, as long as you do that loyal to your own feelings and inspirations. As I explained, the creative process emerges from the same place of our dreams; so the reforms on any dreamworld vision are just a continuation of the dream itself.