Whilst being at the Art House an emerging writer was invited to come and talk to me and my fellow residents and write some kind of prose either about or inspired by our work. I found the experience invaluable to talk to some who is also creative, but in a different field.
He expanded on some of the concepts of anxiety to create a psychological profile type report to accompany the work. Which also alluded to some of the inspirations and starting points of this body of work and some of his own thoughts on the work.
Anyway, here is what he wrote (i hope you enjoy it as much as i did:
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Clinical Report: Analysis of CP's Anxious Urban Landscape Dream.
I have ordered my analysis by starting with the upper and/or more extraneous elements of the dream and working my way towards those with a deeper and greater significance - an almost literally top-down approach. I should mention that some of the material in this report has been informed by a background therapy session with the subject.
Lines of some sort tie the subject to her locality - local-I-ties. (Symbolic puns are common in dreams.) They are taut, so could be securing anchor lines; or they could be puppet strings representing manipulation from the outside; or, in a similar vein, bondage to a significant place; or, lastly, suspension lines, betraying the subject's sense of dangling uncertainty and rootlessness.
The sky is, she says, largely a blank - emptiness? An unwillingness - or anxiety-induced inability - to think about her situation (the sky representing the upper, more conscious mind)? There are "projection lines" but in which direction are they going? To me they signify all-too-obvious join lines (reminiscent of stained-glass leading). The subject is trying to reassemble her shattered, fragmented mind and memories. An impression reinforced by...
...The threatening, jagged skyline, apparently resembling shards of broken glass; and the building fragments themselves. Their edges abut perfectly, so a good reconstruction job has been performed, but there is only dream-logic holding the sequence together. This is what one would expect however: the building material of dreams is the remembered pieces of our lives that made the deepest impression on us - they can be, and often are, snap-shot moments; and with the rational mind out of the equation there is nothing to question unworldly juxtapositions.
As to the principal content of the dream, it is clear CP feels that dilapidated and abandoned urban environments pose exciting possibilities for exploration, but that they also induce great anxiety within her. I suggest that a childhood fascination with dens and make-believe transformations of found-places has become, for some reason, now associated with a very unhappy, even traumatic, event. Coupled to this is a now adult understanding of the possible dangers of entering such buildings, and an artistic sensibility about them. Yet some of that childhood sense of exciting possibilities remains alive, hence her ambivalent attitude towards these places. This is evidenced primarily in the number of doorways found in the dreams-cape Some lead to darkness (danger, anxiety, uncertainty), and some lead to brightness (hopeful possibilities and playful escape).
Finally, it is perhaps worth noting the underlying mood of her dream. The textures and colour and smell of these places seems to have seeped deep into her subconscious. She has an especially strong recall of the sense the surfaces give her: rust-stained concrete, running and mouldering painted walls, water damage, general dilapidation.
The psychoanalytical significance of this latter observation is hard to divine, but informs my clinical recommendation: the subject should find a way to express and explore her pre-occupations and anxiety. Given her apparently sensate nature perhaps this should be through artwork.
by Robin Lawrence
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