{"id":29319,"date":"2025-09-28T21:56:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T20:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/?p=29319"},"modified":"2025-11-03T14:34:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T13:34:22","slug":"dreamfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/dreamfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Dreamfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visiting Dreamfield by Sarah Ryan<\/em><\/h4>\n

About a decade ago I learnt how to record my dreams. Because there\u2019s that split second when you wake, isn\u2019t there, before the whole thing dissolves, when if you don\u2019t catch it somehow, it\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n

I started using a Dictaphone – just pressed and talked into it. Writing is lovely, of course, though it\u2019s the wrong medium for Dreamfield: like trying to scoop-up mist with a net. When you wake in the liminal space with an image still glowing, if you try to write it – the act of writing melts it away. The image is still there, briefly intact, and \u00a0the moment you recruit the prefrontal cortex, motor planning, the sequencing of hand and eye, you\u2019ve switched tracks and by trading one state of mind for another, the Dreamfield – like a whale surfacing for air: gives you just a glimpse – the fin, maybe the spray, the curve of its back and then slides under into depths where your waking mind can\u2019t follow.<\/p>\n

By training yourself to press record it becomes automatic, like muscle memory. So you\u2019re not leaving the Dreamfield, you\u2019re still inside the dream and from here you can stay a while longer and let the creature show more of itself to you before the tide of wakefulness pulls you onto the shore.<\/p>\n

Later, playing the recordings back, it\u2019s quite amazing and strange, like stepping through a hidden door. Sometimes it feels unbelievable.. is that me talking? Images, symbols, whole narratives unrecognisable. Other times it feels like returning to somewhere very familiar but in a completely different realm, a place that lives outside of waking memory until suddenly recalled – it floods back into focus with exceptional clarity.<\/p>\n

You always think you\u2019ll remember, don\u2019t you, in those first few moments awake – when it\u2019s so sharp, crystalline, every colour and edge intact. You\u2019re sure you won\u2019t need to record it. And then.. it\u2019s gone, folded itself back into the deep.<\/p>\n

Last night I had a kind of mythic dream which I didn\u2019t recall until later in the day, chatting to Emerald in the coffee shop and on the counter was a flyer for a charity auction, and one of the prizes was a trip to see basking sharks. I think it was the word \u201cshark\u201d that pulled me back. Suddenly the fragments surfaced: a humongous whale, the size of a hypermarch\u00e9, followed behind my car along the coastal road, moving like a land animal. Not threatening; fascinating, more than anything.<\/p>\n

And then a woman came into view at dusk, stepping into the water from the beach, with a shark nearby in our sight line but not hers – tiny by comparison to the hypermarch\u00e9-sized whale, though a real threat. We called out: careful! And gestured towards the shark.. she came back out; and all was well.. I forget the rest.<\/p>\n

Though remember thinking (in the dream): maybe Jonah really was<\/em> swallowed by a whale and lived inside it for a while, because – well\u00a0if the whale was that size, it could actually work, couldn\u2019t it? and then thought: it would be nice if a friend was swallowed too – so you could share the experience, because it might be a bit boring on your own inside a whale.<\/p>\n

And back in waking life I thought about Jonah.. and looked up the biblical story, and saw that the whale is not a monster but a holding place, a dark interior where a transformation happens.<\/p>\n

For nearly a year I\u2019ve been living on a wild, liminal coastline, beautiful and remote – near Lands End, and it has felt mythic in its own way.\u00a0So perhaps the dream was naming this last year: a kind of deep-sea interval where ordinary daylight rules don\u2019t apply. Walking, writing, working, restructuring, building. In that \u201cwhale\u201d space, held long enough for something to have transformed. Now on the shoreline, ready to meet whatever rises from the deep.<\/p>\n

Yesterday evening, before the dream, I\u2019d stepped out after the rain, before sundown, and a double rainbow had magically arched across the storm-cleared sky.<\/p>\n

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Visiting Dreamfield: land whales the size of a hypermarch\u00e9, double rainbows, and images that shimmer then slip away in liminal space. A meditation on imagination, transformation, and creative practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dispatches-from-the-field"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29319"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29350,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29319\/revisions\/29350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbloodart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}