These 4 paintings in oil were done for a university painting class. (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec) They are part of a series of nightmares and recurrent dreams, which is why they foreshadow a rather dark future!
Atomic Dream
I dreamt that I was walking down a street in a suburb of Montreal, when there was a bright flash behind me. When I turned and looked, the mushroom cloud was rising above the city. I experienced that bodily shock of realization that nothing would ever be the same again, and that the world as I knew it was coming to an end.
The Family
In this dream, I was a child and I could see out the window that there was a volcano beginning to erupt outside of the kitchen window. I was in a state of absolute terror and panic, and I was trying to convince my family that we had to leave NOW! – get in the car and GO! They just kept on with what they were doing, and I couldn’t make them see our terrible danger.
Unwilling
In this dream, I found myself in a room filled with cardboard boxes, and I could hear a train clicking and clacking, coming closer and closer, and I realized that I was actually in a train tunnel. The boxes were all over the tracks, and in a panic I started trying to clear them. I turned around again, and there was my two-year-old son standing on the tracks. I yelled at him to get off but he folded his arms, stuck his chin in the air and defiantly pouted ‘No!’ The train was almost upon us. I woke up.
The Writing on the Wall
I have dreamt many times over the years of a pussy-cat which grows larger and larger until it becomes a panther, which then turns and fastens it’s golden eyes on me and I realize with a shock that I am going to die. When I started this painting, I was in therapy and didn’t know what the panther represented. Through the painting of it I came to realize that it is my ‘shadow’ of course. The ‘writing on the wall’ (mene mene tekel unpharsin) comes from the book of Daniel, and means roughly – ‘you have been measured and found wanting, and your doom is upon you!’ And this is the sentence that my shadow had indeed passed on me. The dove represents Jung’s ‘self’, and though it was not present in the dreams, I believe it does indeed draw me to greater wholeness.
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