Dream May 18th 2009

Dream May 18th 2009

I had an interesting dream last night. I was entering a photo competition with members of a class. It seemed like it was a class from my high school but none of the other class members were really identified so I am not sure if it was high school or a more recent class, maybe a photography course I was taking.

The photograph that I was entering was a close up of the side of a metal building, corrugated tin like texture but more modern. There was an area that butted out like a shelf and I set something on the shelf, it seems like it was an open book. There was a narrow tall section of open clear blue sky on the upper right. It seemed like the book was very important but I cannot recall exactly what it was or how it fit into the meaning of the photograph. I had a feeling that it was the book that made the photograph. I also remember that I was having difficulty deciding whether to present the photograph in color or black and white. I think I finally decided on black and white. I thought it was a pretty good photograph and stood a good chance of winning.

But as always in a dream there was struggle and my struggle was writing the artist statement that was required. I first started to do it by hand printing. The first row was in small caps and then on the second or third row I changed to sentence case. This is a problem that I have frequently with printing, like on writing a check. I will start with all upper case letters on the payee and then in the amount will use sentence case with capitalization. It doesn't seem to be anything I plan, it just happens. Sometimes it will change in the same row of printing. It happened in printing out my artist statement. I started over using sentence case but the lettering looked bad. In addition to that I was running up against the deadline and I realized that I would never finish it by hand. Another trait I have of putting things off till the very last minute.

It was time to take the photograph and the statement to the place of the judging. The people were all separated into classes and each class was under a separate tent canopy. The only place I could find to sit was on the other end of the grounds with an elementary class. My brother Dale was also entering a photograph but he had everything together and ready to go, as is usual with Dale. He tried to help find me a place where I could write my artist statement.

Then I had to find a typewriter to type up my artist statement and the only typewriter was a very ancient manual. Then I had to find paper. I was going to go to an office supply but I saw the woman that was going to do the judging. Dressed all in black, she was large boned, heavy, not fat, but large with a square face and black hair tied in a small ponytail. She had a ream of paper and let me take a few sheets. I ask her what would happen if I did not have an artist statement and she said it would be considered a failure of something, which I can't remember but I took it to mean that my great photograph would not have a chance of winning without an artist statement.

I went back to the typewriter but before I could start typing the time was up. I went back to the tent assigned to my class to look at the photographs and they were almost all really outstanding images but none of them had artist statements. The notes the judge had written on each of the images was extremely complimentary. I could not believe that these people whoever they were, they still seemed like classmates from high school that had never shown the least interest in photography, could do such great work. I felt very inadequate with my tin building.

I finally found the table where my photograph had been and the note on it was "good, not quite." As I was wondering what that meant, I realized that the photograph that I was looking at was a night scene, with moon and an abandoned wooden building. It was not my picture of a metal building.

Then, set off on another table away from the contest I found several photograph, mine included. These photographs were still in developing trays and obviously excluded from the contest. When I took mine out of the developer it slowly turned all black until it vanished.

When I woke up and was thinking about the dream I realized there was a considerable truth in the dream. I am constantly struggling but not with outside forces, my struggle is almost entirely with myself just as it had been in the dream. The struggle of not being prepared, not following the rules, not following thru on what I wish or need to do. The world is really very simple. It is me that I am having all the problems with. Or maybe that is just what happens to people that photograph snakes.