The Dream: An artist friend is selling her two-story studio. The unfinished downstairs smells musty, like a basement. Black construction paper lines some of the walls. The person moving in will use the larger of the two upstairs rooms for her painting. The smaller room, to the right as I look at them, will be for storage.
Interpretation: The downstairs, evocative of a basement with its musty smell, tells me that I’m dealing with an issue that has basic, or primitive, overtones. The black paper evokes a dark cave, perhaps one with writing on its walls (paper is something we write on). That it’s construction paper hints something was built on this obscure foundation. This train of thought leads me to the Lascaux cave paintings. Here these French caves symbolize our species’ early commitment to art, and the dream deals with some sort of unconscious change in my relationship to the art I make.
The dream emphasizes duality: the studio has two stories; the upstairs has two rooms. One part of me is getting rid of her studio; another part who’s moving in seems to be elevating the work, taking it to a higher level (on the second floor) where she will paint in the larger room and store things in the smaller one. I hope the transformed artist will be nourished by the primitive energy from downstairs, and that she can synthesize that energy with the higher consciousness upstairs.
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