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By Ventral Is Golden
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Ventral Is Golden is a paper collage artist, graphic designer and illustrator.
By Ventral Is Golden
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Ventral Is Golden is a paper collage artist, graphic designer and illustrator.
By Ventral Is Golden
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Ventral Is Golden is a paper collage artist, graphic designer and illustrator.
By Ventral Is Golden
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Oneiric Soils Residency 2023
What Future Will We Dream When We Dream With Plants?
Kos Island
For me, this process began a little before the physical residency with the journalling of my dreams.
I don't often journal so much but tend to take notes of things with a view to make them into an essay or something more substantial later on.
This process felt a little different because I didn't really care if I was writing well or not, and now, looking back, I see patterns of my psyche build themselves up and melt themselves down over time.
Just before this dream I wrote things like: "Draw more freely what I see, not what I think I'm looking at" and "Must return to my regular sleeping shape. Don't eat after 9pm. Drink only tea."
It's probably obvious, but just allowing a little space to let things seep in can help them become significant later on... small ideas repeatedly massage the mind, etc...
So this dream went something like this:
A cool stream of smooth pebbles. Prophets in the puddles, dreaming each other.
An opening in the canopy of a forest into a rocky coastline on which I glide through.
Perched on the edge, looking into the horizon at sunset, an ancient Grecian bust is sculpted from the living rock. The kind who's eyes seem half glazed with amazement, staring as if being witness to a music that poured right through his centre, all creation's flavour.
The air tinged a deep muck yellow and flickering.
Sounds of waves sing crystal meanderings, suffusing atom, air and eye with flower.
A distant man crouches and slips into his silhouette beside a small fire.
Moths and embers rise and merge.
The man has comfortably adjusted his shadow and settled.
As an homage to the simple knowledge that floats like dust - the same dust thats found on moth wings - I sit and push my fingers through the sand, it's cool legacy as glassy as a bed sheet.
Dream Journal:
Recite Death-defying mantra.
We meditate on the three-eyed construction of reality which permeates and nourishes, as the fragrance moves to liberate all from death for immortality’s sake. Even as the vegetable is severed from its stem.
Deep breathing into heart-cave, musical scales clothe the snake of distant places. Defiant spaces.
Placing pebbles from the sea between my fingers to disrupt the logic of the daytime.
First symbols of the twilight’s language, fossils in the salt lake.
Cats paws at dawn shuffle atoms in the creases, like a tiny storm. Huge eyes in all parts for insects dreaming.
Mind language, thunder enlightening.
The soft silver of an olive’s knowledge.
Nowhere finally.
No narrative, only jumbles of protolanguage, protogonos - letters pressed upon the shell.
Feels like a dry leaf, few aches, but movement in the body, moon-moistening the stem, as the green tea settles.
Today I study the shape, looking for the preference, preferring over not preferring, referring to the earth, the earth of course, preferring some state, over some other non-state.
And fire?
Every endeavour to attain its larger body requires some other form of life to give itself away.
The one who gives away alone preserves.
Fire is imminent in all things… whatever is used is never used up.
Perhaps?
The Dream:
Walking through an outdoor Bazaar, tapestries hung in the hedgerows, rugs woven in a manner of a Joan Miro painting, meshed with twigs and nature’s bric-a-brac, colourful circles resembling broken crockery.
This field is a bustling pulse of many narrow paths leading to a summit and a large plateaux.
There are fewer people now, save for an elderly couple and one old lady who I gravitate towards.
She looks vaguely Amazigh, deep charcoal eyes, face of a thousand Saharan sunsets. I walk alongside her.
The floor is now terracotta tiles which descend perfectly into a large sunken bowl in the ground. The lady stops and we look at each other. I slide into the bowl and stand on the far side beckoning her to join me.
We are now stood next to a large desk made from a single block of concrete, behind which stands a young boy, completely hairless, with auburn skin and a dark orange bindu, slightly metallic. He is wearing a grey tunic.
I give him two tokens and we enter through a small fence into another outdoor Bazaar filled with small ruined houses……
The elderly Amazigh lady and I part ways but I stumble upon a market stall which seems to have Amazigh jewellery. However, I perceive their details to be motifs from the Maya - familiar birds, a ceiba tree, a sun disc. I look closer and notice that they have a patina - a greenish blue sheen from the oxidisation of bronze that give them an aquatic lustre. This is very striking as I don’t know of any Maya artefacts with bronze, given that it’s not a common alloy in that region of the world. The jewellery actually looks more Eurasian…
I also see a small horse charm on one of the branches of the tree motif which makes me think of the Steppe nomads. Perhaps this is a brooch of some kind - or a fibula or an amulet?
I hear Perfect Wisdom Sutra being recited lowly over cow bells in the distance as it begins to rain.
The Dream:
There was a conversation in a palatial green house, tomatoes surrounding what became a dispute between mafia looking man-people. I leave this sad greenhouse and walk through a wild garden along a dirt path. Lots of wild flowers towering above me. I have the feeling that I’m being followed.
I feel a warm burst of air in my back and realise I’ve been shot with something. I feel this a second time, but there is no pain… I continue walking as if I have some kind of Rasputin-type energy until I crumble finally to the ground.
There are many white butterflies in cloud formation that gently burst like plumes of smoke around me. Someone grabs my shoulder and turns me onto my back and I’m shot with something for a third time.
Moments before the dream ends, a cord pushes through an opening in my chest, producing a bulbous flower - some sticky death trap with something emerging that I later interpret as a Yaldaboath (a demiurge who trapped the light in materiality).
There’s a distinct feeling that my body separated in some sense. A widening, a boundary dissolution, a soil body.
I wake up gasping for air.
The following morning, I made a pile of collage word fragments (a word salad).
Two words stuck to my fingers whilst recounting this dream; “WALK, THE FLESH”.
Later in the day I was reading Sādhana (Realisation) by Rabindranath Tagore (1915), and came across this passage;
“Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realise, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings”
The Dream:
It is late Springtime and the amphitheatre stretches below us. A geological scar cuts through its centre where once a stream dug in. Now a mud bed where turtles go to pray.
We are perched high above on a small rocky outcrop overlooking the great bowl of a city.
It is evening and the weight of time changes the light into an idea of velvet drowsiness.
The plant here is Oleander. The human here is me.
We sit upon a rug of matted roots, encircled by a collection of small, coloured stones, carefully placed.
I give Oleander a white and grey feather. It gives me one of its hard, ochre leaves.
I give Oleander my head, and nestle it into its stem.
It gives me another dead leaf.
Kneeling, still looking out towards the horizon, my body begins to dissolve into a mineral gloss of small orbits.
Mixing through the stomach of gravel, the stomata of a pebble. All lichen magnetised.
The whirling rivers, chasm emptied, retains the vague persistence of my body.
As Oleander now I begin to recite.
“Within the lungs of lichen pulled
The pebble when dilated
The iris widens into clouds
All dreams amalgamated
And through the spectrum of the pip
A prism seeds in blue
And pink and green is how the flower
Strains the music through.”
Eckoustra - This Mud-body is clear epiphany.
Choose any arbitrary point on the eternal river-cycle.
First mull over a mugful of mud.
Then second to Eckoustra.
And finally third Dvija - twice born in bird form.
"Hello, nice to meet ya."
A sulphuric mud-body formed from the thermal water source of Kos island.
Ventral Is Golden is a paper collage artist, graphic designer and illustrator.