The Emerging Artist In My Dreams

The Dream - Pablo Picasso 1932

Once in a while I get to share some more personal insights with you. Normally we like to keep the attention on you, the great artists of our times, but today it’s my turn!

The revealing information you didn’t know about me before is that I have been an avid student of my dreams for about 25 years. I have learned many things from this and I can honestly say that my life has been richer and more rewarding as a result. I have sometimes avoided problems, had insights into future directions, studied in dream-universities, and hung out with very real dream-friends (most of whom I have never seen in my waking life).

Dreams cut across all philosophies and religious teachings – everyone has them, at least once in a while. Some people believe that dreams are simple re-runs of recent events twisted into strange patterns. Others think that they are purely the result of chemical and electrical processes in the brain. To me, they are simply another layer of reality.

The reason I bring this up today is that while I was writing another article I remembered a dream from a few nights ago. It went like this:

I was having a conversation with an artist about her art career. She was describing how she had been in discussions with a major gallery to have her work represented by them and that the whole process had been going really really well. Until…. she referred to herself as an EMERGING artist. After that, the gallery director completely lost interest and the whole representation deal fell through.

That’s it. So, I was wondering what this dream meant. It’s possible that this is some yet-to-be deciphered message just for moi. But here is what I think it means:

Maybe the whole “emerging” title doesn’t really serve anyone.

Do we refer to engineers or attorneys or car dealers as “emerging”. No. Would you go have a treatment from an “emerging” acupuncturist? Not me .

So what is the whole “emerging artist” thing all about really? The more I think about it it sounds like one of those B-grade horror flicks where creatures emerge from the swamp! Now, would a gallery director want to hang out with those folks? Probably not!

Maybe an artist is simply an “artist”. And maybe the tag of “emerging” keeps us in a box where we don’t belong or need to be. As we said in a previous article, there’s that old saying, “Wherever you put your attention, there you go…”, and once you think of yourself as emerging, maybe you’ll always be struggling to fully emerge and be successful.

Or maybe it really was a couple of mis-firing neurons in my brain that night…

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