From "The science of lucid dreams — and how to have them" (WaPo).
I know what it's like to want ideas for paintings and not to be able to think of any, and at first, this lucid dreaming idea seems fantastic. But then I thought I wouldn't like it at all, because my waking self, who would do all the work of brushing the paint on the canvas, would be a slave to the dreamer. The dreamer — admittedly, also me — would have effortlessly seen the finished work, seen it as if somebody else had done it. That would leave me, the real-life, hard-working painter, two steps removed from the deep and meaningful creative work.
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"The dreamer — admittedly, also me — would have effortlessly seen the finished work, seen it as if somebody else had done it. That would leave me, the real-life, hard-working painter, two steps removed from the deep and meaningful creative work."
It's your dream. You created the dream work. You have the right to put your name on the real-world painting...
YES. I do this all the time. But I was never a very good artist. But it is also infuriating, because sometimes the image or the idea vanishes as quickly as it enters your mind, and you end up learning over many years like I have to stop what you're doing and at least capture the essence of the idea in words before it's gone.
Luckily now we have AI image generators that can be tamed to give you the results you want if you know what you're doing, and you have the time to be patient. As the results, unfettered by the timid restrictions of censorship, become more refined the sky's the limit. It might even be able to reproduce memories. It will be interesting to see where this goes in 5 years.
Just tell the AI what you saw and let it do the painting.
Lucid dreaming is just taking melatonin -- harmless in ultra-tiny doses but sometimes upseting. It merges your daytime world with your sleep world minus the metaphoric insights.
You become an artist by training hard to be an artist. You learn the skills, forms, vocabulary, and great artists preceeding you. It's like being an athlete or a car mechanic. You mimic what came before and learn how to use the whole toolbox and find your voice and place. Then you're an artist.
Richard Hugo has a good book on this.
I have solved several mechanical conundrums in my dreams.
It's really the proccess of just walking away, and coming back to the problem in several days.
Looking at and bringing yourself up to speed, usually its the change of perspective, that reveals the solution.
When did the WaPo become People magazine?
One avenue of many.
I have solved some tough chemistry math problems by dreaming up the solution. It isn't active thing with me-I am not trying to do it- it occurs when I go to sleep thinking about them. Same goes with tough crossword puzzles where I think I have exhausted the possibilities, but if I go to sleep thinking about it, I sometimes dream up part of the solution. It happened to me just a few days ago as I was trying to solve NYTimes Sunday crossword from sometime last year- it had a very unusual theme to it that was eluding me and making it impossible to fill in the key clues- I dreamt the solution- I even got up out of bed to make sure I had it.
I tried to sketch stuff from the metropolitan museum in NYC with my eyes closed. Pencil on cardboard.
It was a good exercise.
Your waking self worries about being in thrall to your sleeping self?
That reminds of a Seinfeld bit about his nighttime self and his morning self, with nighttime self constantly screwing morning self by staying out too late and drinking too much. Ultimately, morning self gets revenge by not getting out of bed so daytime self loses his job and nighttime self has no money to go out partying.
Here it is.
Pretty much every creative or athletic 'genius' is a biological fluke. The truly successful ones have a definite talent plus the ability to focus and work hard.
Each person is comprised of thousands of genetic dice rolls, and sometimes the genetics works very well in one way but not in another way (e.g., beauty-is-only-skin-deep Amber Heard). Everything came together physically for Michael Jordan despite reports of interpersonal cruelty. Swimmer Michael Phelps performed well in the Olympics because he was born with a long-armed, short-legged fish body. I've read that people with perfect pitch don't necessarily have other musical tendencies, and tend to lose note calibration over time.
You do what you can do, and sometimes it's easy to do what you do. Never mind the equity crowd.
A laudanum-induced dream seems to have worked well for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who conjured up "Kubla Khan" in 1798. Coleridge believed that a few hundred lines of the poem had come to him in a dream, but he was able to remember only a fragment upon waking.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A laudanum-induced dream seems to have worked well for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who conjured up "Kubla Khan" in 1798. Coleridge believed that a few hundred lines of the poem had come to him in a dream, but he was able to remember only a fragment upon waking.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
“ It's your dream. You created the dream work. You have the right to put your name on the real-world painting.”
I wasn’t talking about copyright, but the activity of doing the work and feeling like a slave to somebody else. But having said that, I think there is also a danger that what you see in your dream is something that you actually did see in waking life and that could be somebody else’s work. You might not even realize what planted the image in your head and you might mistake it for yours and make the “My Sweet Lord“ mistake.
@khematite
Coleridge is such ecstatic titillation. Custom friggin' designed for AI art. Thanks for the inspiration.
I think about that post sometimes, that you did about the guy who complained that he was always tired in his dreams, but he practiced lucid dreaming all of time.
"Basically, I would have to struggle to keep my dream eyelids open, and would generally pass out randomly etc. The sleepiness is very extreme, far more sleepy than I've ever experienced in waking life. It's so bad that it's basically my reality check: if you're super sleepy, you're probably dreaming. This is affecting my lucid dreaming. The sleepiness generally becomes worse when I'm lucid, so I'll easily 'fall asleep' into non-dreaming sleep. Even if this doesn't happen, the sleepiness is extremely distracting.... I tried to do things like drink imaginary coffee, but it doesn't really work...."
It's almost like working in your dreams denies your brain needed rest.
'I wasn’t talking about copyright...'
I wasn't either.
I meant it in the sense that it's a product of your mind. It is your 'vision' to paint or not to paint.
Your second point is more interesting. If you're a song writer it must be tough wondering, 'Did I hear this melody somewhere?'
I often dream interesting plots for films, but I can't really do anything with it.
I've heard stories of musicians dreaming about a song and capturing it one way or another after waking up. Keith Richards got the opening riff to "Satisfaction" that way.
The idea of doing work as a slave to some other side/aspect of you is interesting, definitely watch "Severance" on AppleTV - about a company that developed a surgical technique to restrict memories to specific locations - in-work memories cannot be recalled by employees when they are not at work and vice-versa. It is a really interesting show about your specific idea.
In STEM the only sign is making sense of something, which is not foolproof. There's Climate Science.
I had an art program running 24/7 on a PDP11/34 with a color terminal in the late 70s. It would draw various modern styles and constantly overwrite what it had previously drawn, pixel by pixel. It was good enough to draw watchers, albeit people who were there anyway; but it was their choice for their idle space. The slow overwriting was very watchable.
The program code was creative of me in an abstract sort of way, but there was no feeling that the art was my creation.
Coleridge did internal alliteration. Map together n-d-th(voiced)-th(unvoiced)-t, m-b-v-p-f, g-k, j-ch, s-z, and zh-sh
Ann Althouse:
But having said that, I think there is also a danger that what you see in your dream is something that you actually did see in waking life and that could be somebody else’s work. You might not even realize what planted the image in your head and you might mistake it for yours and make the “My Sweet Lord“ mistake.
Even if that were the case, I see no difference than setting up an easel at a museum like thousands of others have done. Practice. Odds are pretty good you couldn't replicate it and pass it off as the original. If someone points it out, laugh and acknowledge.
I don't know how I would feel about this. I have started painting more regularly again in the past few years, and work almost entirely from photos I take myself, so there's not really any place in my workflow for that kind of inspiration. I'm just working from reference. I haven't done anything "finished" from imagination, recently, but even back when I did, I enjoyed the process of moving elements around in my head, moving my mind's eye camera, etc. I still enjoy that though -- as a nerd, I want to do some Lord of the Rings fanart paintings using designs markedly different from the Jackson films, so I occasionally daydream out what the layout of this or that place would have been. So I think having inspiration come to me in a lucid dream wouldn't be all that satisfying, since I wouldn't get to play with my mental Legos and plasticine.
"Coleridge did internal alliteration."
Hey buddy, this is a family blog.
rhhardin,
"I had an art program running 24/7 on a PDP11/34 with a color terminal in the late 70"
Still have the code? There's a lot of PDP 11 emulators around.
"The idea of doing work as a slave to some other side/aspect of you is interesting, definitely watch "Severance" on AppleTV - about a company that developed a surgical technique to restrict memories to specific locations - in-work memories cannot be recalled by employees when they are not at work and vice-versa. It is a really interesting show about your specific idea."
Wow, thanks!
I don't have AppleTV....
"I meant it in the sense that it's a product of your mind. It is your 'vision' to paint or not to paint."
But it doesn't *feel* as though it is. To paint, you devote hours of careful work. If it doesn't feel like an image that emerged from your head but like something you saw somewhere, you feel like a studio assistant and this isn't the work you envisioned when you chose to style yourself an artist.
"Your second point is more interesting...."
I disagree. The second point is the copyright problem, and you just got done distancing yourself from the topic of copyright! I feel as though you are dissembling. Either be interested in the legal issue or not. I note that you wrote in the passive voice. As if interestingness is objective. It's subjective, and there's no shame in being interested in law more than philosophy or psychology or art. Just admit it. I find the philosophical angle more interesting, and I blog about what I find interesting. Subjectively.
Wow, thanks!
I don't have AppleTV....
Worth it for a month of binge watching.
Khematite: yes, that's Coleridge's version, romantic and Romantic (and he's not the most reliable narrator anyway). He spent nearly his entire life, from early childhood, in boarding schools, artist's colonies and universities, studying ancient, Renaissance, early modern and contemporary poetry and writing. He learned form and mastered ancient languages and modern ones, studied German philosophy, and basically read everything available in the arts at that time.
Then, after reading a book about Shangdu of the Yuan Dynasty, he took two grams of opium to fight off a very unromantic bout of diarrhea, took a nap, woke up, and began writing Kubla Khan.
Kind of the opposite of garbage in, garbage out. If you want to write poetry, I highly recommend The Book of Forms over opium or LSD.
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