Recurring Nightmare 71 by 51cm Acrylic on canvas. Unfinished
I don't really like this painting at all Even if I finished it, I can tell I wouldn't like it.
Maybe one day I'll go back and finish it, maybe if money is tight and I need a canvas, I'll paint over it.
I had this dream from as young as I can remember and all the way until I was around twelve I think. It got less and less frequent and then stopped altogether.
I used to wake up from this dream screaming and even though I was awake I'd be so distraught I'd still be able to see things in my room coming out of the walls. I'd be screaming 'They're coming to get us, they're going to kill us!'
My younger sister who I shared a room with told me later that she always thought there was something wrong with me when we were kids because of my strange night terrors.
A lot of the dream was so abstract that it was impossible to put into words but it was pure abstract terror. Also a lot of the dream is now long forgotten.
The first part of the dream I remember is having no physical defined edges, like a feeling of being malformed and my size and shape would be fluctuating. It was a very scary feeling and it would feel like my thoughts were a tiny dot in the distance.
I'm unable to properly describe it but when I think about it the feeling returns to me for a few seconds and makes my heart palpitate.
The second part of the dream was a giant black shiny blob that was sucking all the colour in the world into it. It was like the end of the world and everyone was wailing and crying.
I also remember these horrible men with rounded off features and thick leathery nicotine stained hands, they had something to do what was going on and they were the scariest a human could be.
The whole thing was complete fear and terror, there were other parts of the dream which I no longer remember. It drove me nuts and I could never make any sense of it and I must have been having this dream since I was about four.
Sometimes now I long to have the dream again so I could see if I can make sense of it as an adult, but at the same time I think, no I don't want to feel and see that again.
I decided to paint it as it was quite a major part of my childhood.
A therapist once told me that she thought that for me to have such bad recurring nightmares from such a young age, something bad maybe happened to me as a child.
She wanted to regress me and we tried but she couldn't get me under.
I was talking to my mum on the phone and told her about my therapist trying to regress me.
My mum got angry and said something along the lines of 'You shouldn't mess with things like that, my friend got that done and she found out awful things and it ruined her life......and none of it was true......and it's not like anything happened to you anyway!'
hmm, ok mum.
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