{"id":2360,"date":"2011-05-08T12:45:24","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T16:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2011-05-08T15:19:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T19:19:37","slug":"van-goghs-dream-road-to-the-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/05\/van-goghs-dream-road-to-the-stars.html","title":{"rendered":"Van Gogh’s dream road to the stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Seeing the reference to Van Gogh sunflowers in my poem “A Way of Creating” – which was \u00a0inspired by a dream encounter with Van Gogh reported by an artist in one of my workshops – a friend reminds me that we now have a marvelous online source on the wellsprings of Van Gogh’s creative process. This is the beautifully edited and translated collection of his letters first made available in 2009 by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n

In his letters, Van Gogh speaks of dreams, in his own life and in the lives of other artists. Writing to his brother, he recalls how Corot explained that he colored skies entirely pink because he dreamed them that way:<\/p>\n

When good\u00a0p\u00e8re\u00a0 Corot\u00a0said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my\u00a0dreams\u00a0landscapes with entirely pink skies,\u00a0well, didn\u2019t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say there are things one senses in the future and that really come about. <\/em>[Letter 611<\/a> to Theo Van Gogh, May 20, 1888]<\/p>\n

Late the following year, after he committed himself to an asylum in Saint-R\u00e9my,\u00a0Van Gogh – the master of vibrant color – reports that he isn’t dreaming in pink, but in half-tones. “What I dream of in my best moments aren\u2019t so much dazzling color effects as the\u00a0half-tones\u00a0once again.” \u00a0 [Letter 800<\/a> To Theo September 5-6, 1889]<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Van Gogh describes how what he sees – the stars at night, for example – becomes a deeper and more brilliant vision in his dreams, one from which he can them create. There is the sense that when a painting isn’t quite “there,” he plants it in his dreams and lets it grow from that deep nocturnal ground. He looks at the stars in the night sky and this sets him to dreaming. He painted his celebrated “Starry Night” from memory and dreams, during the day, after looking up at the sky through the bars of his cell ovefrnight.<\/div>\n
–<\/div>\n
Then there is his extraordinary letter to Theo from Arles in July, 1888. It rambles far and wide, even by this standards of this most wandering letter-writer. \u00a0He paints a word-picture of an old garden where he stole \u201csome excellent figs\u201d. He complains of a lady creditor with \u201ca brain of flintstone or gunflint\u201d. He flits from poetry to \u00a0coarse body-talk, bemoaning that he has lost the power to bander <\/em>(get a hard-on), itemizing the cost of paints and canvas, then evoking “the eternal question: is\u00a0life <\/em>visible to us in its entirety, or before we die do we know of only one hemisphere?”<\/div>\n
–<\/div>\n
He offers these thoughts to his brother on death and dreaming and the road to the stars.<\/div>\n
–<\/div>\n
\n

The sight of the stars always makes me\u00a0dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me\u00a0dream. <\/span><\/span><\/em>Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France.<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.<\/span> What\u2019s certainly true in this argument is that while\u00a0alive, we\u00a0cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we\u2019d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot. <\/span><\/span><\/em>[Letter 638<\/a> To Theo, July 9\/10, 1888]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“We take death to go to a star.” That phrase will be with me now, whenever I look at Van Gogh’s starry skies. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seeing the reference to Van Gogh sunflowers in my poem “A Way of Creating” – which was \u00a0inspired by a dream encounter with Van Gogh reported by an artist in one of my workshops – a friend reminds me that we now have a marvelous online source on the wellsprings of Van Gogh’s creative process.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,5,20,3],"tags":[164,165,166,163,162],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-dreams","category-history-of-dreaming","category-imagination","tag-artists-dreaming","tag-star-dreams","tag-star-road","tag-van-gogh-dreams","tag-van-gogh-letters"],"yoast_head":"\nVan Gogh's dream road to the stars - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/05\/van-goghs-dream-road-to-the-stars.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Van Gogh's dream road to the stars - 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2360"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2373,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions\/2373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}