Dreams are such a wonderful piece of art to uncover beliefs! This morning I woke up with what I can only call a gem from my dreaming self that speaks in no unclear language, depicts a belief of mine so precisely. I am speechless observing the endless creativity combined  with actual benefits. Very practical at that! This observation in itself should losen the firm grip the belief has had on me for years.

Creativity isn’t a waste, isn’t some kind of bastard child of my consciousness to be cuffed in order to “succeed and function as a responsible, valuable individual”.  Quite contrary to what I thought and still sometimes (often) think as my dream made crystal clear:

Art or waste of time? (dream June 28/29, 2010)

“In the dream I sit down to make a test[1] in one of the classrooms at school. I don’t use paper to write my answers on but use two small sized blackboards. The answers come easily and fluently. As I am about to hand in the two boards I realize that I better write this down on actual paper. The chalked up letters will easily fade. So I quickly copy my answers on a piece of paper and hand it to the teacher.[2] While doing this I see the results of the signlanguage tests I did prior, two 4’s gosh…that’s not good![3]

Then I notice that Claartje, my twinsister, also made this test but not the usual way. Instead of handing in a paper she created a piece of art, painted on a thin wooden panel, huge in size that she hanged on the ceiling of the classroom. All my classmates stare at it in utter disgust/shock. They think: wow that’s stupid, you won’t pass the test with that!

One girl in particular comments: Pffft, she thinks that’s art??? Her voice filled with disdain. I look at this girl and defend my sister, I say: It is art and good at that! And observe the painting. It’s a wonderful depiction of Guust Flater in a very complex composition that shows she has amazing perspective-skills.[4] The composition is creative, unlike any other I’ve ever seen and shows brilliance and immense creativity on her part. I say: maybe this education might not be the right place for her and an artschool would be better….but darn this is good, no question about that. I wonder if her piece of art as answer to the test will be accepted and appreciated by the teacher. Then I wake up.”

I was struck by the theme of Claartjes painting. She depicted a comicstrip character of comics that my brother used to read often when I was younger. I often read those comics too and hadn’t thought of those in years. To American readers this comic strip might be unknown. Who is Guust Flater? I have looked  on wikipedia if the Guust Flater comics have been translated in English and found the following information about this comic:

Gaston (in Dutch Guust Flater)is a comic strip created in 1957 by the Belgian cartoonist André Franquin in the comic strip magazine, Spirou. The series focuses on the every-day life of Gaston Lagaffe, a lazy and accident-prone (his surname means "the blunder") office junior. It is very popular in large parts of Europe (especially in Belgium and France), but except for a few pages by Fantagraphics in the early 90s (as Gomer Goof), there is no published English translation.

Gaston Lagaffe (Guust Flater)

Gaston was hired - somewhat mysteriously - as an office junior at the offices of the Journal de Spirou (the real-life publication in which the strip appeared), having wandered in in a state of confusion. The strip usually focuses on his efforts to avoid doing any work, and indulge instead in hobbies or naps while all around him panic over deadlines. Initially, Gaston was an irritating simpleton, but he developed a genial personality and sense of humour. Common sense however always eludes him, and he has an almost supernatural ability to create disasters ("gaffes") to which he reacts with his catchphrase: "M'enfin!" ("What the...?"). His job involves dealing with readers' mail; the ever-growing piles of unanswered letters ("courrier en retard") - and the attempts of Fantasio and Léon Prunelle to make him deal with it - are recurring themes of the comic.

Gaston alternates between phases of extreme laziness, when it is near impossible to wake him up, and hyper-activity, when he creates various machines or plays with office furniture. Over the years, he has experimented with cookery, music, decorating, chemistry and many other hobbies, all with uniformly catastrophic results. His Peter Pan-like refusal to grow up and care about his work makes him very endearing, while ironically his antics account for half the stress experienced by his unfortunate co-workers.

Gaston's disregard for authority or even public safety are not confined to his office — they occasionally threaten the entire city. He is not above covering road signs with advertising posters or even snowmen, reasoning that it is the only decent use that they have — being oblivious to the chaos and accidents that covering the road signs cause.

Reading this I realized how apt this dreamsymbol is! My biggest fear is to be seen as Gaston (though I share his take on authority.)

And during this testweek this belief of the overly creative person who doesn’t fit in with the confines of this education came up strongly again as I observed my good friend Andrea and our enormous difference in approaching exams.

The belief being something like: I am a chaotic lazy person who’s creativity only gets her and others in trouble. Who’s creativity is nothing but a bubble that will burst to air, pinned by the needle of reality. Who uses creativity to run away from her responsibilities and the tasks that really do matter and need to be done.

 I actually literally thought these things as I listened to Andrea just prior to the actual waking state test of deaf culture that we performed last week. She was able to recite all the historic dates and events of the history of the deaf culture. I grew more and more uncomfortable…. I felt inadequate, I wasn’t able to recite the same things and thought oh boy this will become another flunked test.

But surprise, surprise, the test was very different than all of us expected, much to the fury of my classmates, Andrea included. The test was conducted so that my creativity worked for me not against me. No recitable facts were asked, the questions asked for creative thinking and giving your own opinion on certain subjects.

I recall Andrea coming up to me stating in utter surprise: Emmy, you were able to write down so many answers! Whoa how did you do that??

The self image I had prior to the test was so in line with the depiction of this Gaston character that Claartje painted in the dream. Claartjes way of approaching her test was much like as to how I approached the actual test some days ago.

My twinsister often represents myself in my dreams. It allows me to take a good look at my reality, to look at myself from the outside. I believe with this dream this is again the case.

I shared this dream this morning with Andrea and she gave such sound advice: “Maybe you should focus less on: “I am chaotic”and just do the things the way that it comes most natural for you.”

There are many more aspects to this dream, too lengthy to go into here right now. I feel for instance that it also included other aspects of my personality structure. For instance I think it is no coincidence that one focus[5] I’ve perceived in dreams is actually working at a newspaper, like Gaston in this comic strip. (Though not having the exact same approach as Gaston, luckily for him or he would be fired quite soon). One thing is certain: the dreams are like a sea containing many species of interesting fish that can be explored to gain insights to the nature of reality. The aspect I described above of how my dreams connect with my counterparts, other focuses and such is like the deep depths of the ocean, hard to fully understand from my viewpoint now but…reachable. This particular sea is so huge that there will always be more to explore and uncover. I am happily exploring it for (maybe even more than) this lifespan!  

[1] I am making tests in the waking state all week for my education to become a signlanguage interpreter.

[2] This is a very interesting aspect in the dream. I think it serves as a note to myself to actually write down my thoughts, dreams on a more permanent medium. Paper or on the computer for lately due to making not enough time for it I’ve not been writing down my dreams (the black board representing my mind?) but trying to hold them in my memory. But those memories might fade like the chalkboard letters….

[3] In the Netherlands we don’t use letters to indicate how well we have done. Here you get grades between a 0 and a 10. The 10 being the best….so a 4 is really bad. I actually didn’t perform well on the actual exam of signlanguage this week though I have yet to hear my results. This could be precognitive. It were two 4’s in the dream. The test I “flunked”,at least so it felt to me, was called Signlanguage 4. So…. A 4 for the fourth signlanguagetest is quite possible…. Will get the actual result this Wednesday.

[4] The perspective taking in the dream refers to my own perspective taking skills that were so important for the fourth signlanguage test. I had severe difficulties with that. The dream says to me and I experienced it when I did a similar test again yesterday (which I did much better on) that if I allow for my own creativity, the perspective taking element will be correct.

The dream also shows that I’m afraid the value of “my”art will go unrecognized and the way my “art”, my creativity will help me master the skills I need for signlanguage interpreting. My hobby of interpreting (= translating) dreams for instance helps me to also be as creative and develop my skills with translating as a signlanguage interpreter. It is also important that the classmate in the dream was Els, a student of my former education who during a presentation I gave there on dreams and how I work with them said: “But Emmy working with the unconscious is dangerous! It is unconscious for a reason!” I off course didn’t agree with her. Interestingly enough I used that presentation to show the value of dreams and how it helped me in approaching dramatherapy sessions with clients.

[5] I prefer to name it other focus instead of another lifetime for I think it a better term. I don’t believe we actually “own”lifetimes as I described in one of my earlier blogposts. I think we focus in and out of adventures with our consciousness, and that it doesn’t have to involve the whole lifespan of one individual. I hope to expand on this more in another blogpost in the future.