“Thoughts about Dream Geometry”

“if time the measure of possibility, then space is the index of power, if a dream is a place then there must be an applicable geometry” napob

In 1975 I did an installation in Toronto at Gallery 76 which was the Ontario College of Art’s gallery, Gallery 76.  This installation comprised of large sheet of cold roll steel suspended from the ceiling of the gallery in stacks. The steel rods that I used in this work to suspend the sheets of steel where eventually recycled into the  frame pyramid built according to the specifications of Cheops Pyramid in Egypt.

For the longest time I kept this pyramid  in the basement of the Experimental Arts Building which had formerly been the Brinks Building. In the basement there was a vault safe room, it had one bare bulb from the ceiling and when you shut the large metal door the silence almost knocked you off your feet. I would go there on a daily basis and sit in a wooden chair place inside the pyramid, the chair was positioned so that my heart chakra was approximately in the same position as the kings chamber. As I sat there in the dark I practiced my open eye meditation with my hands positioned on my knees in a Pharaohnic   pose. This went on for sometime, then one day I got a spectacular result. As I sat there in the dark a steady  stream of golden light entered the room on my right, drawing a large circle two or three feet in front of me and left the room on the left. It had the appearance of someone with a large sparkler  drawing a circle in front of me  I was immediately hit with a rush  in my heart chakra. To confirm that this was happening I noticed that the shadow of the pyramid frame shifted on the walls of the room as it the light manifested and and dissolved .

I sat there for the longest time amazed, overwhelmed, confused and mentally altered. Finally able to get up I went upstairs to the main studios, where people were coming up to me and touching me and smiling. I walked out of the building and went home, the next day I decided I would move the pyramid home and set it up over the bed.

For the longest time my  girlfriend and I slept under the pyramid, and over time we realized that our sleeping pattern had shifted considerably. We were now sleeping fourteen to eighteen hours a day under the pyramid.

One night while in a dream, I asked myself a simple question, Where is this dream happening, if a dream is a place than it must have a geometry ?   I immediately got a response in the form of drawings  and telepathic explanations of what I was looking at, I awoke and got up and jotted down the drawings I had seen and explanations.

I remembered as a child watching my grandfather making house paint in the basement of his home, he used white lead, turpentine, linseed oil and other ingredients to make this turgid off white paint. I decided I would do drawings in this type of paint, so I ordered some white lead and mixed a quart of this paint; then using a 4b  pencil I created the twelve drawings that made up the Dream Geometry set. I had decided that I would go see Av Isaac of the Isaac Gallery and see if I could show my drawings. He was amused by my enthusiasm but nothing came of it so I went to see Carmen Lamanna of the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, and though he was interested nothing came of it. I was somewhat discouraged and so I stepped into the Fiesta Restaurant which was a basic greasy spoon and had a coffee. Royden Rabinovitch was sitting at the counter and we talked for a while and he encouraged me not to give up and keep searching for  the right place to show these works. As I was walking home I realized that the Fiesta Restaurant would be the ideal place for the show, I remembered the booths along the one wall as the ideal space to show the twelve drawings. I went and spoke to Gus Tsouboukos the owner, and though he was a bit confused by my demand agreed to let me display the works for a month in his restaurant. Gary Michael Dault wrote an article for the Globe and Mail.