Mick Hartley

Off this morning to the Wellcome Institute’s “Sleeping and Dreaming” exhibition.

I spent most of my time looking at a series of dream paintings by artist Jane Gifford, which were far more evocative of the peculiar logic of dreams than the more prosaic exhibits elsewhere. There were, I think, 144 of them (12 x 12), slightly larger than postcard size. No captions, but there were folders nearby listing all the pictures and supplying a brief one-paragraph account of each dream. You had to look around for these folders, though, which I thought was odd given how much they enhanced the experience of looking at the pictures. While I was there quite a few people walked in, had a quick look, and walked out again. Mind you, when I pointed out a folder to a couple of elderly ladies who’d wandered in and looked slightly baffled as to the nature of what they were confronted with, they seemed less than grateful. One doesn’t, on the whole, engage in conversation with strangers at exhibitions.

Jane Gifford has her own website, where you can get an idea of her paintings: click on Recent Paintings 2004 and wave your cursor around to get all the little clickable pictures to appear. Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to have included the dream descriptions.

It was odd seeing this picture of hers, of white terriers in a tree, having just seen the very similar painting done by Freud’s famous wolf man, of the white wolves in a tree. Freud deduced that the wolf man as an infant had witnessed his parents having sex a tergo – doggy style – and claimed him as one of his greatest cures: a claim strongly disputed by the wolf man himself. What exotic childhood experience prompted Jane Gifford’s dream, I wonder?

Off at the other side of the exhibition, I became absorbed in some studies of sleeplessness, and all those attempts people’ve made over the years to stay awake for as long as possible. I vaguely wondered what the odd noise was – I’d failed to notice any interactive exhibits which involved bells, but thought nothing of it. The continuous low-level ringing passed me by. I also failed to notice that the gallery had rapidly emptied out, until an anxious employee of the Wellcome Institute pulled me from my reverie and drew my urgent attention to the fact that the place had been evacuated due to a fire alarm. It was all very…..dreamlike.

Not inappropriately, here’s Roy Orbison. And let’s throw in the Everly Brothers for good measure. As featured in Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio show on Dreams.