as someone who's always struggled with addictions - sex, love, alcohol, travelling - it's no mystery to me why people love drugs. they take away my cares, i return to childhood when someone else paid my bills and i could live mostly in my imagination. toys, picture books, i could construct my own reality. and, of course, this carries me into museums around the world.
a work of art has to be consistent with itself in order to be a believable world in which i can lose myself. and a piece of fantasy is essentially a re-building of my dreams. i read recently the key to this: ONLY I KNOW, IN MY DREAMS I AM AGELESS. and the last few nights i've examined my experiences. and yes, i can perform feats of motion, transformation and action far beyond what i can in the daylight.
as i know, my body is actually paralyzed when my brain coursing through other worlds. this must be so i don't act out my dreams in my physical life (ie. sleepwalking). and the last time i watched a stage-hypnotist i realized under hypnosis we regain the magic actions of our dreams. the amazing performances of ordinary citizens quite astounding.
people turn into animals, clowns, robots, their movements absolutely fluid. they become creations of their unconscious. and so hypnotherapy can give us a touch of our agelessness. many commentators on humanity say all of our life is within us. a friend years ago said under LSD he re-lived a whole day in incredible detail. i imagine with trillions of brain-cells i must have the capacity to remember everything.
and so i like to wander amidst other people's creations to recover my own youth . no wonder all art isn't 'nice' and 'comforting .' nightmares are very much a part of my experience, though melatonin has made them a lot less bloody and violent. and i haven't mentioned stories of all kinds, fiction, movies, poems. each takes me on an adventure back to my beginning, if they are skillfully done, no jarring detail to break the flow.
i live in many trances. bill ball said in A SENSE OF DIRECTION, "during the last twenty minutes of a play, the audience is in a trance. "my mother said i was obsessed with childhood and this perhaps the reason why. i like to be carried into a space where i am ageless. the drug of art focuses my attention in such a way i forget i have to pay the bills, take out the garbage, pet the dog. i enter the Homeric space, voyaging on an ocean of belief.
i guess i'm not alone, since new, gigantic museums have become considered works of art in themselves. i'd like to go to bilbao, spain just to wander through the edifice frank gehry has created. time is our great tormentor. any relief from it a welcome gift.
