Sam Walker Reflects: Dreams, Memory, & the Surreality of it all

I have been thinking about the place in which the preoccupation with dream came from.

In the past I have spoken about many theoretical reasons: ten years of written accounts of dreams, the respite of sleep, the elusive imagery that makes sense to paint because it is unseen and unreal, how the imagery flashes back to me at strange times, like déjà vu or a warped memory… but I think these are more logical justifiers that skirt the core catalyst.

Someone I care deeply about fell ill three years ago and her previously minimal dementia progressed significantly. She became lost in a transient state of confusion between past, present and the imagined, only able form scatterings of new memories. Memories unbound by time and interwoven with dream and past recollections of how things once were.

I heard a second-hand retelling of how much she had loved that the ambulance had taken her around the hills to look over the city one last time. When she was still able to text she once sent a message that she had been on a surreal motorcycle ride. For us on the outside the accounts of dreams framed as memory were a mixture of emotional devastation and reassurance: a loss and a striving. But she did not know about either emotion because for her it was real.

Dream is reality while we are in it. We experience the emotions, understand incomprehensible sights and narratives, we believe the places we are in and the things we experience. The only difference between her and us is that when we wake we understand none of it was real; just a slurry of people, places, objects and tasks to help process our subconscious preoccupations.

I have no intention to derive interpretive meaning from my dreams in painting them, it is the imagery that is important. I believe the dream images remain vivid and clear in my mind. From comparing these mental recollections with written accounts it is evident dream memory is fallible, that the clarity is a mirage: layers of memory stacked upon itself, reinforcing and diminishing indiscriminately. The original image slips away and in its place is the true image — the only true image — of what I see now.

In a moment — one that may have been of clarity or just as easily been her words without direction — she told me that I must have reached into her dreams and taken the images from her mind. Maybe I should not put stock the views of someone who can not distinguish between memory and dream. But I have the sense that is exactly who I should trust. 

Late last year when I visited her — amidst huge life changes, in an all encompassing personal state of liminality — I had barely sat down when she looked at me as though the armour I had built was transparent. She said, “Not many people understand you, do they, Sam?” Like all people with unexpected misty eyes I brushed it off with a joke, but deep down a voice said, No, no one like you.

Although I have quoted her words, and despite consciously trying to burn them into my memory at the time, I still can not be sure that is exactly what she said. But I remember the way she looked at me, I remember the way she made me feel. 

Memory is fallible, dream memory is fallible, and if anything, I think my work is an attempt to hold a mirror to that. To draw fine lines between the unconscious and the conscious to form up some semblance of what it is to experience the indefinite.