At the beginning of 'The Science of Sleep' by Michel Gondry the main character Stephane shows what the dreams are made of. You can see how he puts the ingredients to a pot and mixes them all up- the pieces of memories, childish fears and things we always wanted to happen but they never did. The facts our awareness simply can't handle to deal with it- as we can see Stephane still not agreed with his father's sudden death. The final result of his cooking is a short dream, featuring a nice memory of his father, soon turning out to be fake and cruel at the end- disturbed by reality. The nature of dream is always surprising and often worrying. The emotions can be real or almost real, but they mix all together in a way they could never do it in a normal life. It's all because of the REM phase essential, Stephane says: you move your eyes while sleeping, so you follow the events your mind is taking part in. We actually DO have a second life while sleeping. At least those of use who are lucky, or cursed enough to be mad enough to live it.
It was Dorothea Tanning, not Salvador Dali, who introduced me to surrealism as a form of perceiving life through a category of the dream. It was years before I falled in love with mr Blanchot and his daylight madness and before Jaques Derrida taught me that nothing is the way it seems. Dorothea Tanning caught my young and not shaped yet out brain, shook it and made me believe that what I dream of actually IS the reality. With all its' bright and dark shades, all ups and downs and first if all, entirely equal to the one we're surrounded by.
The fascinating thing about her creation is showing the world we seem to know, but taken over and violently conquered by the thoughts escaping from our minds. The thoughts get shapes and become creatures, built of our fears and nightmares, eating alive everything which can remain a stable and fixed part of a so-called true.
There is one quality I love about Tanning's creatures- it's the evanescence of their being, making you keep closing and opening back your eyes as you try to believe whether they are really here or are they a projection of your own mind.
What was left of me out of 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' was a childish couriousity about corridors and stairs. I could discover them forever, endlessly imagining those hidden behind a doors shut down for random pedestrians. I kept on drawing existing places, thoroughly sketching all the details only to let them in after that, those mysterious creatures hidden in my mind. They were going there and multiplying, until I totally stopped controlling them, until it was unbearable, until I had to jump into one of my drawings by my own, to get lost running through the corridors. This is how, being still a child, I learnt to practice daydreaming.
My daydreaming was still, however, a little bit different from the one of Dorothy Tanning. Her reality, to me, always seemed to connect with one chosen from the 'true' world (if you can risk calling anything 'true' while talking on surrealism) to melt with it in order to deconstruct it and create a new composition. At least that's I believe what Jaques Derrida would like me to see. My reality was fully mine and only, the corridors I was passing were corridors of my mind and the stories I written- after I decided to write instead of becoming a (rather ordinary in my case) drawing artist- had their own world and lives and felt quite reluctant when I was interfering.
It is in the end, all thank to Dorothea Tanning that my imagination was always strictly linked to places. It was a place having a soul that I entered. The story was created afterwards. And while telling it, I always had this feeling, which is going to stay with me forever, that once the story begins it has already been told long time ago, in this place.
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