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Guided Dream
I was sitting in the cafeteria in the Central House of Artists and was drinking coffee when a tall dark-haired figure approached me. The head was sailing apart from the figure and was vague.’ Hi! There’s a thing to discuss,’ said the figure in a deep voice. This voice filled the whole cafeteria and sounded as a number of bass guitars. The figure took a seat opposite me. The black-haired head was in its place now and I scrutinized all the details of the creature: high cheek-bones, brown eyes and large hands on the table. A light grey aura of the creature was a sign of its good health and intentions. The bass vibrations continued to fill the room. My voice resembled abrupt passages of a tenor saxophone. When our duet came to an end, I decided to stop meditating. When I came up onto the surface of my consciousness, I saw my old pal Andrey Lysenko, a painter, and heard the end of our conversation, ‘ … It’s all settled. Ok.’ He shook my hand, excused himself saying that he had loads of things to do and left. ‘We might have agreed on something,’ I surmised and continued to meditate.
Some days later Andrey called me. Besides his voice, in the receiver I heard the noise of wind and the chirp of birds. I thought that he must be walking in a forest not far from his house. He told me about a forester’s birthday. The forester got drunk, went to Starbeevo Lake, and ran away from militiamen in the lanes of Khotkovo afterwards. Then I heard birds singing again, and Andrey asked, ‘What about the article? Have you finished it?’ Thus I found out that I had promised to write an article for a catalogue.
To express the essence of Andrey Lysenko, the personality of the man and painter, I decided to use Patricia Garfield’s method. It took me a day to get ready. I recalled the pictures by Andrey, contemplated them, plunged in their world, tried to exist in the atmosphere of their subjects and to wander in them. At the same time I imagined Andrey, his house in Abramtsevo, his family. I prepared myself to communicate with Andrey’s inner self in the space of dream. This dream occurred sooner than I had expected.
I was walking in a forest, and fly-agarics of huge size struck my eye. I was about to kick one, but something prevented me from doing it. I felt that it was strictly prohibited; it would be a bad omen. A bit scared, I left the path and stumbled across a pointed ant hill. It looked like a small Egyptian pyramid. The resemblance was so striking that I did not peer at the ants scurrying about. I could predict what I was to see, and I did not want to see it. ‘Your ant hills are strange,’ I said into the desert wood. There was no answer. I found myself on a clearing. There were two guards there. From afar they were scary, uniformed, with speaking devices, as if they were Bolivian commandos fighting against drug cartels. But they turned out to be children pretending to be guards. They sat on a fence, their legs dangling in the air. The helmets on their heads turned out to be panama hats. The kids said that they didn’t like going to the forest, they were fond of going to the pond. Both the girl and the boy seemed familiar to me, but I could not recall where I had seen them. They opened the gate and showed me the way. I did not feel like going to the pond, but I kept in mind that I should find Andrey.
I set off for the pond. But I found myself by a sea gulf with azure water and a lot of white yachts. I walked along the pier for a long time, watching the yachts rocking on the waves. I saw the masts without sails waving in the air - as if the sea was trying to eat sushi with chopsticks. I watched the sea’s efforts to grasp ‘sushi’. Sometimes the chopsticks of the yachts managed to take a little cloud rather skillfully, and the cloud disappeared. Nobody, I thought, knew that the sea was a cloud eater, and it ate clouds with the masts of yachts. Might it be dangerous? And what would happen to the earth if it went on like that? On the other hand, the sea had been eating clouds for a long time, but no disaster had happened so far. Then I started to speak to a person on the pier in order to find out if he knew about the sea. Was I the only one who had guessed? Despite the hot weather, the man was wearing a quilted jacket. He looked at me, and it became obvious that everybody was aware of the fact. As always, I was the last one who found out about it. The man in a quilted jacket continued with his work. He swept the pier, hammered nails and tacks in the banisters, tied something up. It was obvious that everything he did was necessary and meaningful.
At that time I decided to look for Andrey in the mountains. While looking for him, I would have enough time to climb up a low mountain. To climb without any ropes, climbing irons, and ice- axes. At the foot of the mountain there was a sort of a ticket office for climbers. To buy a ticket, you should go inside. I did and found myself in a dark candlelit hall. There was deep silence there, broken now and then by a jingle and a low voice. I went past a group of people in cassocks. They looked like priests. They were gazing at a big icon. It was an image of the Protector of climbers. I was not supposed to look at the icon. I was well aware of it. I passed by. Somebody hailed me, and it turned out that I was a priest too. They treated me as one of them, but I felt that I was a stranger. Then I grew bolder and asked where Andrey was. They looked puzzled and seemed to take it as a joke. I made an excuse about having some work to do and left the cathedral. Immediately I found myself in the forest again and saw the fly-agarics under my feet and triangular ant hills along the path. I got tired and woke up. It was a partially guided dream, so I was not wide awake. I got up, loafed about the flat, dragged myself to the balcony to listen to the croaking of frogs, and went to bed again. Before falling asleep, I reminded myself to find Andrey. I found myself in Paris. No Eiffel Tower, no Montmartre - nothing, thought of as representative of Paris. But at the same time, Paris it was. Real, authentic, and genuine. The most Parisian Paris I had ever seen. It was just a cafe, just an outdoor cafe on a cobblestone pavement in an old side-street. I lingered there. I did not want to leave. There were two musicians there. One of them was playing the guitar, the other was singing. I listened to the music, and it dawned on me that I had found the person I had been looking for. The meeting had taken place, and I could be free. I went along the street away from the cafe. The street led me into a dead end. A wall was in front of me. I got over it. There was a path and white flowers behind the wall and goats in the distance. I stood at the top of a hill. The path led smoothly to a pond. On the bank one could see country houses and a church with two domes - blue and gold. I walked down, but then I felt like running. It turned out that running was easy and joyful. I pushed off the ground and flew a little bit. My strides were about ten meters. By the pond I leapt into the air and flew over the water towards the village. Happy and delighted, I woke up and went to the balcony. It was dawning. I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to keep the feeling of my incredibly beautiful flying over the hills. Every Indian knows that flying at the end of a guided dream is a sign of success. Flying means you’ve coped with your task properly.
Having analysed the dream, I perceived that I had met Andrey Lyssenko at least four times. At first I met the children pretending they were guards, but actually they protected the Glade of Childhood from intruders. Then I met the man in a quilted jacket who took care of the pier; then, the priests in the ticket office in the mountain. The fourth time I met him, he was the side-street with a cafe in Paris. I went downstairs to my study, sat down at the computer, and wrote everything I knew about Andrey Lyssenko, the painter. Yakov Dorozhkin |
