I’m still feeling the shivers of the mortifying dream through which I lived last night. In the dream, I’m a hermit crab, condemned to walking sideways, with unpredictable springs of activity. I peel my skin from time to time. I’m peaceful if left alone, hazardous if attacked. April has taken on the shape of a sea nettle, moving elegantly and almost imperceptibly forward, with gently rhythmic contractions and expansions of her bell-shaped head. Carnivorous and opportunistic, she entangles prey that come her way with the myriad stinging cells in her tentacles. I propose a more intimate association with her, but she rejects my advances, moving away gracefully. Following this humiliation, I continue to live in the mud, while April floats where the tides take her. We end up living separately. I wake up in a tremendous sweat.
                          From The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit, page 58

    Thinking within the fields of image, the mind crosses also into the knowledge the unconscious holds -- into the shape-shifting wisdom of dream.
                         Jane Hirshfield: Nine Gates

     Slowly I discoverd the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality.
                         Matisse

For the length of a lazy afternoon
I lay in bed, alive to the music
Of the future, musing and dreaming on 
The extravagant feats of heroic 
Cultures still to come....

                  From Sonnets 2000, #36, 

     See Stephen Denning, The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit, (iUniverse, October 2000) 
 

     Stephen Denning, Sonnets 2000, (iUniverse, October 2000)