in 1904, having come out with "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900.

 

Neo Rauch (b. 1960, Leipzig, East Germany).  "Paranoia," oil on canvas, 2007.  Rauch's work has been compared to Surrealists like de Chirico and Magritte, although Mark Tansey comes to mind from my perspective, and I wish I had seen the exhibition (which closes next week) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  Go to Sanford Schwartz's review in the New York Review of Books entitled "Magic Show" for a discussion of the artist and the show.

Are your morning dreams really vivid?  I mean the ones that come right before dawn, or right before you get up in the morning, which for some of us is the same thing.  That final glimpse (so brief!) of another dimension tends for me to be the closest to the awake-while-I'm-dreaming variety, and so blatantly real, with full developed back-story (I know who the people around me are and why I'm with them; I'm aware of our complex history that stretches far beyond the boundaries of the dream itself), and there is such startling clarity I think I could draw you a map of the place, or a diagram at least.  I am connected to what happens and the landscape in ways you get to be in dreams -- I move my fingers and leaves grow on the branches overhead, I can change the way the light falls across faces and objects just by thinking about them, I occasionally have control of events. 

Then I get up and find comments posted in reply to thoughts I had a long time ago, ideas I've kept to myself, opinions I was shy about sharing.  Today I wake up to a pitch for Liasons Dangereuses in cyberspace from the inimitable "RJK" and then without warning "Suzanne" stumbles by my post on Madame Butterfly after a discussion of Taylor Caldwell.  The real world is so rich with possibilities -- Thank you, Gentle Readers!

And no, it isn't always 1904 in my dreams.  At least not in the way you'd think.

But what if I told you it was?