Life Is a Dream
Or Maybe a Scrapbook of Random Images
This piece is a collaboration with Michael Young from . Many months ago, I reached out to Michael because I was a big fan and asked if he wanted to work on something together. Here is that something. I wrote the words, he did the illustrations, and we both spent way too much time on it. I hope you like it.
Recently, I had a dream where I was standing in the shower, fully clothed, with a famous psychologist. He shared some wise words with me, words I was certain would change my life. But when I awoke, I couldn’t remember any of them.
Someone once told me a dream is a string of images your mind turns into a story. I don’t know where I heard that or if it’s true, but it sounds a lot like life. Who knows? Maybe it was another dream.
There’s an old Spanish play about a king who hears a prophecy that one day his son will overthrow him, so he locks the kid in a tower. The adult prince eventually escapes and discovers the truth. Enraged, he throws someone off a balcony, threatens to fight the entire royal court, and gets captured.
He wakes up back in prison, and his caretaker tells him it was all a dream.
He believes him.
The same thing happens again, only this time the prince realizes that whether you are dreaming or not is no excuse to act with dishonor. He doesn’t throw anyone off a balcony this time.
After all, you never know what you might awaken to next.
Have you ever woken up in the middle of a dream and tried to get back to sleep? But no matter how hard you squeezed your eyes shut, you could never get back there? I think childhood is like that: a picture so quickly fading that we wonder if any of it was real.
Words and images help us make sense of the world. But no matter how much we concentrate, we can never rebuild what lives in our heads.
Things always turn out different.
Remember that game we played as kids when a message was whispered from one person to the next in a circle? It was never the same after it left the first pair of lips. Was it? Maybe everything is a translation of something else, a scrapbook of images we are trying to put together, one confusing piece at a time.
Pablo Picasso liked spending time with writers, not painters—because his work was about ideas, not images. He was always trying to reduce what he saw in his mind to the simplest version possible.
Early in his career, Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, who sat for him a total of eighty times, marching across rainy Paris to visit his humble apartment in the part of town where the clowns lived. Decades later, she wrote a biography about him. On the cover was his portrait of her. It seems we are all finishing each other’s sentences—one way or another.
They say that art imitates life, but really everything is an echo of itself, like a pair of mirrors placed in front of each other. Have you ever opened up a flower to find only tiny, baby flowers living within? It’s as if everything wants to become more of what it already is—an endless recursion of existence disappearing into itself.
“Did you ever notice,” I said to a friend once while walking in the woods, “how the roots of a tree are really just branches growing into the ground?”
“No,” he said, looking down.
I have a lot of conversations like that.
The journey of an artist is one of approaching a destination you never fully arrive at.
As a kid, I used to draw Garfield the cat, but my drawings were never as good as the pictures. When I was twelve, my mom enrolled me in a university-level art class, where we worked on a variety of projects using charcoal, pastels, and graphite. In the class, we learned the rules of shading and light and perspective. We made the drawings look just like the pictures.
I stopped drawing after that.
When I was a teenager, my dad gave me a guitar and taught me some chords. Then, whenever he would ground me, he’d take away my boombox and say, “If you want to listen to music, you’ll have to play it.” I did.
I wanted to sound like Jimmy Page but ended up sounding like myself.
In college, some friends and I entered a talent show. We wrote a love song to our dormitory building. During the performance, two of us wore long underwear and bright orange ski caps, and the third was dressed in a two-piece suit. The friend in thermal wear shook a plastic tube of cheese balls while I played guitar. He screamed every line an octave higher than I sang it, and our backup vocalist wearing the suit recited a story about a dead horse.
During the climax of the song, our friend cried out in agony, “Buttercuuuup, I missssss yooooooouuuuu!”
We won the talent show. The next year, we performed the same gimmick with a different song. We won again. I got bored with talent shows after that.
In 1972, Neil Young released the best selling record of the year in America. “I don’t know who that was,” he later recalled. His fame led to his releasing a series of records nobody liked. “Everyone thought I’d failed,” he said, “but I knew I’d succeeded… because I was free.”
Instead of aiming for the middle of the road, he headed straight for the ditch—because that’s where you meet more interesting people.
Everything is always changing. Life is a kaleidoscope that gives way to new experiences, but only when you keep turning it. Hold on to anything for too long, and it disappears.
Hemingway would never write about the same place twice. He gave himself one shot to get it right, because that is all any of us ever gets. There is a flower that opens up once a year called the night-blooming Cereus, and we are all that flower.
Existence is a river without end. Seasons change, bodies age, but the waters within never stop flowing.
I have a friend who writes down every dream he has. He says they are trying to tell him something. I believe him. I’ve never been the kind of person who keeps a journal. My mind is a filing cabinet of half-drawn images and incomplete ideas. The handles are rusty and the drawers squeak, but when I need something, it’s waiting for me.
Over the past few years, I’ve written a dozen books for other people. “Your book is calling to you,” my wife said to me once while we walked down a cold beach.
I hope she’s right.
Not long ago, I heard a comedian share how almost all of his dreams have come true. As he’s gotten older, he admits he doesn’t think he’s living his dream anymore. Sometimes, he’s playing a part in someone else’s.
Some say reality is a shared hallucination, a projection of what lives inside each of us. This should give us cause for humility, to step out of the spotlight of our own illusion and let someone else have a chance.
Because you never know where the next dream may take you.
It’s been five years since my last book, and I’ve changed so much in that time that it’s hard to know what to write anymore. I’ve sketched out entire scenes and stories in my mind of what could be. But when I try to put them down, they never turn out the way I want.
Does anything?
P.S. Be sure to visit Life Crumbs. It’s one of my favorite publications.
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I love how you ask questions and live into them Jeff. Your Picasso story made me think of “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks”~Plutarch
Neil Young definitely knew that after the gold rush the harvest is in the ditch. In that catharsis we are free to arrive and when we disappear, only to arrive all over again. Something tells me your book will write you. Bless you. Beautiful article! 🙏❤️
Not sure what to say. Maybe I’m attracted to photography and art because my writing is mood oriented. I’m discovering that, but dreams drive my plots.