A stay at home dad makes his first painting
Journal 3, Record ID 50, 6/10/1990
Aunt Terry and Uncle Tim in a room with a couple of paintings in it.
One of them is talked much about. Tim takes pains to point out to me the Art Nouveau style trees at the horizon, stylized and flat. I thought at first he was saying that Terry had helped paint parts of it, but I think they were just talking about it and Tim made it by himself.
Above is a fax I sent to my Aunt Terry shortly after waking from the dream.
Comments, 6/10/1990
Uncle Tim responded to my fax with this photo and letter:
The funny thing about this dream was that I didn't know Tim painted! My Uncle Tom is a professional artist, I am, my wife is a storyboard artist/cartoonist, her mother is a textile designer, her grandfather is an artist, and my mother designs clothes, but I had no idea about Tim until I had this dream.
This material needs to be described in more detail, but suffice to say that all of it was verified by Terry and Tim later the same day, by phone call and letter.
Additional comment:
On the morning I had this dream, I lived in Weehawken, New Jersey. My aunt and uncle lived in Minnesota. At the time, I’d only met them in person once. Today, over 30 years later, I’ve seen them in person only three times. I knew very little about them, apart from a few casual phone conversations.
After writing the dream in my journal, I went downstairs and called my aunt at her office. I told her the dream and asked if it made any sense to her. She said it might but asked for the drawing I made in my journal before she’d say anything else. The journal drawing was crude, as most were at that time, so I cleaned it up for the fax I sent (see top of article). For reference, here was my initial drawing, made when I’d just woken up. It’s messier but contains all of the same details.
The details:
Painting size, approximately 25” x 50”
Painting aspect ratio, 1:2
Composition dominated by 3 horizontal bands
Each band is dominated by a different texture/pattern
The bottom band is light and neutral “white”
One band is composed of yellow and blue shapes, “trees”
Something I couldn’t remember in the bottom band
Painted by my Uncle Tim
The errors:
The top band, not the middle band, is where the yellow “trees” (bamboo) are located
The middle band is a rock wall, hinted at in the pattern I drew in the top band but incorrectly described as “sky”
The painting is not “Art Nouveau” in the way it is painted but its graphic 3-tiered composition is common among some Art Nouveau artists
An omission:
There are 2 prominent stones in the lowest band. I did not draw these but remembered something was in that area and noted it
After I sent the fax, I called my Aunt Terry to inquire further. She said that my Uncle Tom had visited with herself and my Uncle Tim about two weeks earlier. My Uncle Tom is a professional artist. His visit inspired my Uncle Tim to make a painting, his first. The painting in my dream is literally his first painting. On the morning of the dream, Tim had asked Terry if she would mind if he hung the painting in their dining room. She didn’t want to but he advocated strongly for it.
Until Terry informed me of these details, I had no knowledge of them. I also hadn’t spoken with any of these people in the previous several weeks. I had no idea Tim might ever want to try making a painting or had the slightest interest in art. I said as much to Terry when I called, that it was hard to believe Tim would make a painting but that’s what happened in the dream, so I was bound to ask.
In the fax I sent Terry, I inserted a cartoon of Tim saying nice things about his painting while Terry reacted as if unimpressed by Tim’s declaration that his painting is “great”. I added that detail for the purpose of demonstrating scale, not for any other reason. Terry was surprised to see that cartoon in the fax and said that it mirrored the conversation she’d had with Tim that morning.
Discussion
In this dream, I was present during a conversation between Tim and Terry about a painting he’d just made. My verbal description and the two drawings I made are good but not exact approximations of the actual painting.
In 2010, I took my wife and daughter to the Louvre museum in Paris, France, where we saw many famous paintings, including the Mona Lisa. My wife is a professional artist and my daughter is a skilled artist also. As an experiment, after returning home (we lived near Paris, in the southernmost Netherlands at the time), the 3 of us made sketches from memory of paintings we’d seen at the Louvre. One of those paintings was the Mona Lisa, possibly the most recognizable painting ever made.
All of our sketches were close enough to recognize the painting they were based on. Despite scoring well against recognition criteria, all of our sketches had more errors than my drawing of Tim’s painting. My sketch of an image seen in a dream, something that is notoriously difficult to do with any accuracy, was more accurate than 3 sketches by 3 different artists of the same painting, the most famous painting in the world. On that basis, I am satisfied that my dream journal sketch and the sketch made about 20 minutes later for the fax are good likenesses of Tim’s painting, despite the minor errors.
I classify this dream as an “Out of Body” (OBE) experience because I witnessed something real that was happening roughly simultaneous with the dream at a great distance. It may be that the term OBE is an inexact or erroneous way to describe my dream but I think it is more correct than, for instance, “telepathy”. It is not “precognition” because I am not seeing the future but could be described as “clairvoyance”, or “clear vision”.
I have had many dreams like this, where I have viewed real events taking place at some distance from my sleeping body. I will post more later.