by BEN BROCHERIE

Last night I had the strangest dream,
I sailed away to China, in a little row boat to find ya,
and you said you had to get your laundry clean.
Didn't want no one to hold ya, what does that mean? And you said……

The first verse of eightes one hit wonder 'Break my stride' from Matthew Wilder (Who?) and later rejigged by Ace of Base (How could you make me remember?), grandly illustrates art, music or creativity inspired by nocturnal happenings whilst we sleep. Whether your preference is for high or lowbrow entertainments, much creativity is spurred by the way of night. I was fortunate enough to be at a Margaret Atwood, book launch of 'the Blind Assassin' in Sydney years ago, and when asked by a member of the audience where she drew her images and ideas for the novel from, she answered simply her 'dreams'; not bad for a Booker Prize winner. Debate is fierce around what purpose dreams have, do they really sort out the waking realm? Putting your crazy life into order by randomly separating and then juxtaposing back together images and events in your life? In the next six hundred words or so I'm going to inject what could be a few images into your dreamscape, then lightly brush the issue of dreaming in popular culture, namely literature and painting

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Vienna was a hotbed of intellectual activity, political activity, psychoanalysis, opera, art nouveau and Freud's cocaine. Famous residents during this time that may or may have not ridden the famous Ferris wheel or crooned 'this means nothing to me' included Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Kafka, and others. Fun times there then. Though Vienna did produce a trio of artists of note, the most famous being one Gustav Klimt. The other so called 'degenerate artists' making up the triplicate were Oscar Kokoscha and Egon Schielle, the later who has come to epitomise the popular image of the tortured artist.

Gustav Klimt "The Maiden"

It was in Vienna also that Sigmund Freud lived, worked and created the notion of the 'unconscious'. In 1899 he published his treatise on the psyche 'The Interpretation of Dreams'. He believed in the symbolism of dreams as a key to unlocking the unconscious mind. Jung, his contemporary and mirror, believed in an approach to the psyche which included not only dream symbolism, but also mythology, art, religion and philosophy. Jung coined the term 'collective unconsciousness' which is also known as the 'reservoir of the experience of our species'.

Salvador Dali is probably the best known surrealist painter, from a group of artists formed in Paris in the 1920s whose ethos was to create in the world of the irrational, possibly coming from rational European government's decisions to send millions of young men to the slaughterhouse in the decade previous. Many of Dali's works came directly from dream images and there is a story that the inspiration for many of his images came directly from his dreaming mind. The story goes that Salvador would sit in an armchair with a balanced spoon dozing and when the spoon dropped he would paint directly on to canvas what he saw in his dreams. Dali was another considered a degenerate artist, and entered popular imagination in the sixties as a new generation discovered his work possibly through the use of mind altering substances.

Surrealist Painters were paired with surrealist writers but their net was not cast wide, it was surrealist painters whom were able to hold the imagination of public appreciation. One of the next groups to capture popular imagination by using altered images or states to inspire were the beat writers and poets of the 1950s and 60s. From New York heading west Jack Kerouac set forth to find America and found himself and a new way of living beyond the conventions of what constituted a suburban existence in a military-industrial complex and imminent cold war nuclear Armageddon. Marijuana, eastern mysticism, Jazz music and Jung were all things that could set oneself on the road to a higher state of consciousness. Inspired travellers, the beats, (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and others) found themselves in far flung exotic locations which we attempt to replicate now clutching our lonely Planet Guidebooks. The trio roamed San Francisco, Paris, Tangiers, Morocco and Mexico City. It is here that the last scenes of 'On the Road' take place, as it was where William Burroughs was living scoring cheap Mexican junk (and boys).

It was under the volcano that Jack Kerouac wrote 'Mexico City Blues' and his 'Book of Dreams' whilst lying in a cot bed, high on 'tea' and high on altitude. Kerouac's writing was automatic, without breaks, and the telex role which he allegedly wrote the counterculture cannon 'On the Road' on, sold in 2001 Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million.

His style of writing and indeed the chaotic lifestyle that Kerouac and his merry band lived set in motion the imagination of a thousand imitators who made their way west towards the Californian coast, indeed he was called not only the 'King of the Beats', but the 'father of the hippies' and without his writing it is hard to imagine a man named Robert Zimmerman being known by any other name.

Next time you are sleeping, and you wake up thinking:- 'fuck that was a random dream!'- remember REM sleep has inspired well known and loved pieces of creativity in the 20th century. But maybe that's just because they were all trippers anyway.

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