Dreamtime Emissaries Personal essay
It’s not the subject, it’s what you carry to it that’s important – what you feel about it, what you’ve dreamed about it.
- Andrew Wyeth, 1997
Last summer during a stretch of oppressively hot and altogether uninspiring weather, I dreamt of a beautiful tall thunderhead on a clear, sapphire blue New Mexico day. A huge, bright white cumulonimbus cloud rose tens of thousands of feet above the ground; deep moody rain fell beneath it; a ‘brim’ of smaller jewel-toned clouds flanked the thunderhead’s center stack. I was painting in the dream, a great painting; wild, big, bold, colorful, joyful. And I heard a voice – or somehow otherwise knew – that my subject was a “Tophat Thunderhead.”
My memory after I awoke is hazy. I pay attention to dreams – I have written them down since high school – and I remember that the dream left me curious what the day would bring. It’d been hot and dry – not very thunderstormy – so I thought the dream was maybe about loosening up (as the dream’s painting presented) and finding some play and joy (the ‘bright colors’, e.g.) while I did it. But then, when I looked out over the western horizon in the mid-morning, I was dumbstruck. There it was: the cloud I dreamt of, or one very nearly identical to it. After all the dry weather, I felt some real excitement; what was this storm doing popping up like that? It was the perfect subject for a painting; it was the subject I dreamt of.
And so, out of dreamtime, and the unexpected echoes in waking life, sprung the inspiration for Dreamtime Emissaries and its title work: Dreamtime Emissary #1 - Tophat Thunderhead.
It’s hardly a new notion to make art inspired by dreams. Many artists have done so – including Rosseau, Breton, and Dali to name a few. And beyond art, we owe many great inventions and scientific discoveries to dreams. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity allegedly developed out of a dream where he was in a field of cows chatting with a farmer. Our ubiquitous periodic table, too, took shape in a dream in which Dimitri Mendelev watched all the elements fall into place on a table. Keith Richards apparently dreamt the opening lines to the Rolling Stone’s famous song, “Satisfaction.” I could go on.
And for another moment, I will: It was, after all, a remarkable series of dreams that showed me that I could be an artist and proceeded to guide me as I took my first steps on the path. I found Taos, NM, after a dream showed it to me. Within an hour of arriving, unplanned, I was hired to teach for the University of New Mexico and work with Taos Pueblo because of the same dream. In a dream I found the courage to undertake the harrowing odyssey that landed me in New Mexico. I wouldn’t have diagnosed a mystery chronic disease or found a cure were it not for being shown the information in dreamtime. And I doubt I’d have found the courage to be a father or meet great love amidst great adversity without the help of several notable dreams. It’s hard to overstate the impact of dreaming and my personal dreamtime in shaping the course of my life.
It’s a marvel to me, then, that we so often end up questioning the value of dreaming. In dreamtime, our multidimensional human consciousness unpacks itself. The dictates of social morays or the laws of physics don’t apply. Anything could happen. And does. A couple weeks ago I flew, my huge wings carried me over giant cliffs while a witch cheered. I knocked her hat off, I felt some concern, but all was ok. It was wonderful. It also doesn’t necessarily make obvious sense. And when seemingly nothing in dreams makes sense to our logical minds, or anything could mean anything, maybe it’s not all that surprising we often dismiss them. What we see in dreams is what we make of them, and what we make of them depends a whole lot on what we believe could be possible – or maybe on what of our current understanding we’re willing to offer up to the altar of mystery and discovery.
Much of the art I have publicly presented has at most obliquely addressed dreams as a primary motor of my creative process. After Dreamtime Emissary #1 - Tophat Thunderhead arrived, dedicating a show to dreaming and the landscape felt important. As I wrote in one of my first artist statements, painting – at least my experience of it – is a trust fall, of sorts, and an act of devotion. Much like dreaming, it’s an alchemical, transformational process. It demands a setting down of preconceived ideas to meet the unexpected while moving toward an unknowable outcome. And it is often quite uncomfortable. Yet the result of painting and dreaming has consistently been a life I relish, and the opportunity to continue moving toward fresh creative horizons.
Dreamtime Emissaries is a show of landscape paintings made of dreams. For the most part these aren’t paintings depicting dreams. They’re more paintings that arose in an active correspondence with dreamtime, a correspondence brought to the outdoor painting process that defines my work of the last decade. Every location in the show is a location at which a dream occurred; every piece was borne by taking the dreamtime memory to the waking life location, and then seeing what happened. Sometimes a novel take on a familiar subject developed, since I’ve painted in many of these spots before. Sometimes it was an entirely new leg of thought. Sometimes it was a moment of personal growth. Oftentimes it was all this and more.
A dream from this spring is a good example that gave rise to two pieces in this show, Homeward Calm, 72” x 48”, and Homeward Calm - Snow, 40” x 30”. In the dream, I was painting a new work in my Homeward series, a large painting of clouds over mountains to the east of Taos, titled “Calm.” When I went to the location in waking life, it had been fenced off. And it was the unexpected end of a multi-year body of work. I grieved the loss; special spots aren’t easy to find and this one had catalyzed profound growth. And then I panicked for a moment. The dream wasn’t literal. In fact I literally couldn’t paint where it showed me working. But in this case it provided different fuel, and a roadmap: “Calm.” It offered fresh perspective that helped me meet a new limitation – being fenced out of a meaningful place – and expand into new possibility. I drove around remembering the dream, and then ended up starting a new leg of work at a related spot that I’d wanted to paint for over a decade. The two paintings that resulted carry forward ideas I’ve worked on for years – time, change, weather – and opened up a new perspective emotionally, creatively, and in my understanding of the dreaming process.
Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols that dreams’ “…general function is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.” With the help of dreams I’ve often had the chance meet uncomfortable parts of my person or life with novel, valuable perspective. The dissonance and incoherence, the imbalance, shown in dreams – that often manifests in waking life as well – becomes an opportunity to find a new equilibrium. The newly fenced-off vista becomes an opportunity to find “calm” and engage with a new body of work; to move forward to literal new vistas.
There is resonance between dreaming and art making, and between us and the landscape. I’ve written in other essays about landscape painting being an ongoing discovery: of the subject – landscape – and also of oneself. How could it be any other way? The subject is life itself living amidst geologic forces and cosmic rays. It’s ever changing. It’s transformation and it’s connectedness. We are the landscape landscaping itself; we just do it in temporarily autonomous vehicles we call bodies, and only for what amounts to hiccups in the span of cosmic time. Maybe our lives are raindrops falling from the great sky above back to the oceanic realms below.
Viewed in this light, our dreams, then, could also be the landscape. Our thoughts. Our notions of the individual and the separate: always nested in the universal and interconnected. Unbounded, timeless ripples in the ever-flowing current, a river in our inner and outer landscapes that stretches back before recorded history and forward to no one knows where. “The dream,” says Jung, “is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche before there was any ego-consciousness…” And in this work and show, the dream opens into the landscape, a great continuity that we are inextricably linked to, at once, one and all, part of.
As I read news stories and feel ratcheting concern about the collective state of our human endeavor, dedicating my life to painting is a delicate tightrope walk between aspiration and uncertainty – what does a painting do, say, for all the socio-economic-political-cultural challenges of today? How does going out into the landscape and translating the experience onto a flat surface circumscribed by a frame help “fix things?” It’s a similar question with dreamtime, with all the seemingly inconsequential gibberish and occasional pops of “sense,” and the significant effort and attention it takes to value them.
Aside from a somewhat brutish undertone, this line of questioning is uncomfortable because the answers aren’t readily quantifiable. One true answer is a simple, “I don’t know.” For art and dreams. Sometimes amazing things result; oftentimes it’s not so clear. And thus the discomfort: when so much doesn’t really make sense, perceivable answers and a sense of certainty are relieving. Yet when I reflect on the best art, and great thinking and solutions more broadly, only more questions follow: from where do ideas that shape our world for the better arise? What helps us find the will to grow, change, and thrive? How do we learn to see things differently, freshly, anew? And what kind of grace brings us to imagine and seek out better possibilities?
No list can encompass the whole of an answer, but I’ll nevertheless try a few ideas on for size: Curiosity. Freedom. Courage. Desire. Devotion. Compassion. Grit. Strength – not just to reinforce our familiar, ossified notions, but to grow to meet the greater complexity we are woven into. To experiment. To meet unknowns and see what arises as we constructively engage with them with an eye toward improving the collective lot. In other words, the precise substance and tooling required to make art: creativity, the creative spirit, is our R&D program. It’s what envisions our futures and brings us into connection with our past; it’s the ground from which we grow; it’s what allows us to walk new paths; it’s what gives us back to ourselves and each other.
One of the things I find most challenging in painting – and dreaming – is to meet the strong desire to know where something is going – and specifically, what it is leading to in terms of outcome. It’s valuable to have a sense of what an endeavor might result in, or what it has achieved. And yet much of our sense of deliverables and outcomes are, at best, guesses. And just like the profound inventions and discoveries that have come to us by way of dreams, many decisions aren’t made in a strictly rational manner. Even when we have solid data about “what happened,” the data doesn’t necessarily tell the inner stories, or map the web of hidden outcomes of tomorrow or ten years.
Jung spoke to this when unpacking why he felt dreams were powerful tools for personal growth. The concepts we assume to be obvious and solid, as he says – “…the ideas with which we deal in our apparently disciplined waking life” – “are by no means as precise as we like to believe. On the contrary, their meaning (and their emotional significance for us) becomes more imprecise the more closely we examine them…even the most matter-of-fact contents of consciousness have a penumbra of uncertainty around them.”
And yet this penumbra of uncertainty, this place of less-than-obvious, is where discovery and invention exists. It’s the well from which new ideas spring forth; it’s where we interact with and continue making sense of vast complexity. And art is one of the best tools I know of for relating to, digesting, and making sense of uncertainty and complexity. It stretches back and forth through time, like dreams. It’s process is hard to lasso or replicate, and yet powerful art changes the world.
In my time teaching for the Project for Art and the Environment, one of my favorite topics was introducing observational drawing. It is rich with discovery: we might, say, draw a “door,” and then get to realize that our idea of “door” is never really the actual door that we find when we try to draw it. Our assumptions, the ones we just accept mostly unexamined, don’t apply so neatly upon closer inspection. A door is almost never a rectangle with a circular knob. It’s always at some angle, always shaped by shadows and light; with glass; made of wood or steel. Always unique. We have to dispense with all preconception and see it freshly. We have to let ourselves be changed by something as humble as a doorknob.
All of a sudden there is only witnessing lines and shapes and shades and colors. Everything about “door” depends on how we look at it. And as we unpack this, we simultaneously learn to receive and reassemble amazingly complex information; information that we will never fully understand: subtle atomic motion, stardust, dark matter, empty space between atoms, and more. Information that nevertheless forms the substance of “door,” and is translated into a visible result on a paper or canvas.
It’s a bewitching, bewildering experience. And this sense of bewilderment, it’s an important one. Poet Fanny Howe’s now famous essay on the subject contemplates the idea, saying: “A big error comes when you believe that a form, name or position in which the subject is viewed is the only way that the subject can be viewed. That is called "binding" and it leads directly to painful contradiction and clashes.” Bewilderment, she says, “circumambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.”
In relationship to this to and fro, the spiraling of our understanding as it dissolves and reconstitutes, is the “axis of reality.” Howe continues that there is a Sufi prayer: “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” It is her prayer, too, she says. And in relating to dreams and painting, it is certainly one of mine.
A favorite inspiration in the recesses of my process is Sufi mystic, Rumi, and I recently learned of him also praising the bewildered experience in his Masnavi, where he writes:
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment,
for cleverness is mere opinion and bewilderment is vision.
Bewilderment is a big part of why Dreamtime Emissaries felt important to paint. The entire process was bewildering, and a trust fall. Embracing sense and nonsense equally, collaborating with dreams arising from I know not where. Finding old places anew; following the circuitous and riddling processes of dreaming and painting; seeking out how such things might strengthen us.
With something as simple as drawing a door, and in art always, and to meet dreams, or to relate to the astounding complexity of our world – often we need to realize that we don’t know what we think we know as well as we thought. And then meet it afresh. And then come to an understanding that resembles the thing we thought we knew – but we will never see that thing the same way again. More awareness, more possibility, has opened up.
In his later years, Leo Tolstoy undertook a tremendously difficult topic, the question of what is art, and what is “good” art, in his challenging, messy book, What is Art? I found it filled with equal measures of brilliant and unnervingly hypocritical and ‘errant’ ideas. Yet his fundamental contention is something I personally value: the point of art, in Tolstoy’s estimation, is to affect and transmit a feeling of “religious perception” – his term speaking to a state of attention, not a singular religion – available to one and all. Something that inspires us to more; that translates the discoveries and best understandings of our time and arouses in audiences – of all classes and backgrounds – powerful emotion trained towards improving our collective lot.
Towards the end Tolstoy comments that: “…most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.” They are clever, Rumi might say, but perhaps lack vision.
In this is the seed of Tolstoy’s estimation of “great art”: that which engages reality fully – messy bits and all – and transmits powerful emotion, aiming us forward in the direction of greater good. It echoes the function of dreams according to Jung. In great art we meet imbalance and incoherence, take measure of the mysteries in this world, and bring about new equilibriums. Our cherished concepts get to breathe in their ‘penumbras of uncertainty.’ Vast intelligence – woven throughout sense and non-sense – slips into our consciousness through the cracks and eddies, and in so doing continues its vital transformations to and fro.
Coming back to Fanny Howe, and her process of writing, she meditates on time itself and the non-serial,
“This is, I think, my experience of non-sequential, but intensely connected, time-periods and the way they impact on each other, but lead nowhere.
This is what gives them their spiraling effect within the serial form.
And ultimately I see the whole body of work as existing all but untitled and without beginning or end, an explosion of parts, the quotidian smeared.”
The beginning and the end don’t mean the same thing as we thought they might. We’ve been here before but it feels different this time. Our memory of the past has changed, it has been bent and stretched by the gravity well that is our experience of the present. We’ve dreamt of this and now the dream has changed the course of the day, the painting, the future.
The largest work in Dreamtime Emissaries, Parallax, 72” x 144”, is also among my personal favorites, and serves as a good capstone for much of what this show is about. The work started in a dream: on a huge wall hung an enormous painting of Piedra Lumbre at Ghost Ranch, dwarfing everything, a painting that literally moved as if it were a window into the actual landscape. The closer I got, the more a dark foreground hill receded and the more a profoundly beautiful sunset-soaked peak rose. The title, Parallax, describes the dream, and nods to changing perspectives, and serves as a personal reminder of the unnerving sensation of the ground shifting beneath our feet as we approach something profoundly beautiful, unexpectedly emerging.
Parallax changed my thinking about this show, and continues to alter my thinking about painting. It reaffirmed the power and mystery of dreamtime. And it demanded a novel, hybrid studio and on-location painting process that is heretofore unique in my practice: rather than find a spot and start painting outside, I started in the studio, first laying out the painting based on what I saw in dreamtime. And then I went and found the actual location in the landscape to finish the piece.
Parallax brought me back to a place I dearly regard: the land beneath Cerro Pedernal – Flint Mountain – between Abiquiu, NM, and Christ in the Desert Monastery, where Georgia O’Keeffe made her home and where many artists I respect have also wandered, painted, and found their own meaning in art.
Many people don't know that this was, in a way, where I went to "art school.” It's where I drove so frequently for years to catch sunrises and sunsets; where I struggled to find color; where I learned about composition in the infinite landscape. I tried three different vehicles as mobile studios out there, painting out of a trunk, under a lift gate, and eventually off the back of a pickup truck. I once watched as a nearly finished 10-foot wide painting – my then biggest work – blew over in an unreasonably strong gust, face-first into the dirt. I just cried, gave up, and went home.
But later, when trying to recover from the unexpected, when I thought I’d lost the piece, I would learn a valuable lesson that extended beyond technical knowhow and logistical experience. The wind had given me the most perfect color. I didn’t need to mix more sepia to replicate the color of the ground; the wet painting was covered in dirt already. I just had to use what the place had given me.
Experiences like this are why Abiquiu is where I first made my big leap into painting as a devotional act. It’s where I tried to reconcile the impossible scale of nature with the joyous, overwhelming ardor welling up in my heart. And where I started making space for the unexpected to shape the process and the end result. I started painting twelve years before I really found Abiquiu, but it’s where in the early years I returned over and again to find my pulse, and the blood of why I do what I do.
It happens that a number of dreams led me there, showing me locations and advising me on how to approach them, challenging me to do what I had yet to do – and what I didn’t know was possible. I’d wake up on a hunch and drive hours to find technicolor cacophony on rainbow rocks, or a dull cloudy day, and try to meet it all the same. To “fail” sometimes, and drive back dour and weary; to at other times “succeed” and return home in a big breath of hopefulness.
Always to be out there in the landscape, watching the mystery of an Earth spinning round its axis, taking us into night, hiding the sun, bringing us into a new morning, and giving back the daylight.
As I finished up working on Parallax, standing on soft red dirt and dry grass, the smell of sagebrush occasionally rising into my awareness, a density of quiet fell over the work and solitude suffused the landscape. The last angling rays of light cast a salmon glow onto the high peaks and mesa cliffs and I longed to paint them, too. I felt small in the face of such splendor; I felt accomplishment and trepidation about the piece. That I even found the spot from my dream reverberated again through my body. I wondered whether there were any pottery shards nearby, I thought about artists before me who’d painted here, and then in a flash remembered that dinosaurs walked here only a little long time ago.
Twelve years ago, a couple hours before sunrise, I awoke from a dream and because of it ventured out to paint beneath Flint Mountain. And on this night, with this behemoth piece, I was back, entirely unexpectedly – again prompted by dreamtime emissaries to stretch beyond the world I’d known.
Jivan Lee / Taos, NM / June 2025