Dan Palmgren: The dream I did not want to step out of, Opening
The dream I did not want to step out of
I have a peculiar habit of remembering dreams, even ones that friends have told me about. If I have reminded them of these afterwards, they have not necessarily remembered them themselves: “I have never dreamt of any such thing,” they say.
My earliest dreams I remember from the age of four. When I lost my grip on a balloon I had been given and it flew up and away, I felt a deep sense of sorrow. Fluffy cumulus clouds flew high above me. Although far away, they felt close by. The feeling was very strange and impossible to explain — unsettling even.
When in real life I once poured cream into a rhubarb pudding, I experienced something that should have been mathematically impossible. I saw the cumulus clouds just beneath the surface of the pudding. But this time the feeling was pleasant, and the image struck me as interesting and visual. The clouds were beneath the surface only in my imagination, and I experienced the dream just as real as anything else.
I dreamed of thin sheets of glass, on whose surface I saw reality reflected. Often it was something representational, sometimes just pure states of mind.
Even a stone has a soul — In thick quartz stones, too, the surroundings and the spiritual reflected themselves in the same way, but here the image was inside, just under the quartz surface — and it felt so pleasant I wouldn’t have wanted to step out of the dream.
In the spaces where I have photographed windows, these dreams have become a reality. Now the image and the vision from the dream moved into reality, even though the dream itself had ended. The photographs were taken in a state of disarray in which I lost track of time. I had to be quick, because the light kept changing. Many of these light phenomena I have only seen once, and I realize they are moments that won’t come back.
Something from the subconscious has now emerged into daylight and it’s no longer part of the unconscious — the realm of the subconscious.
Dan Palmgren
Master of Arts
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