Lately when I wake up I still hear a voice telling me my dreams, with a perfect theatrical timing, building up suspense and focussing me on the plot of the story. I wondered and pondered this voice. When I focus my attention on it, it stops. 
I notice that she weaves the stories out of the impressions and emotions from my daily life. I also notice that the stories influence the way I look at life, what attracts my attention and how I eventually act en react on that. 
But it is all a dream story.

I remember my grandmother who the evening before she suddenly died wrote something like: "... could it be that life is a dream and that when you die God bends over you to wake you up".
I was still a child when that happened but the thought stayed with me. 

I remember that my childhood impressions of smelly cars, ugly factories from oil refineries and their smells combined with the intense unhappy emotions from my family created a dream of a polluted world and the wish to escape to other places and times when everything was still pure. I did identify with the suffering people, absorbed in their personal emotional drama's and suffering from their environment. It did feel those experiences to be meaningful and important and interesting and beautiful in a tragic way. It did give me the feeling to be intensely alive and focussed on what really matters. A dream story was created there which shaped my life. I did build a career and devoted many years to learning about and dealing with psychological suffering and always kept yearning for an unreachable natural paradise.
The story did get energy by endless mental repetitions and build up emotions around this themes. The dream-voice does that kind of work and loves to do it for me. She is offering me a very specific kind of life experience in that way. She also brings me in touch with all the information in my environment which confirms the perspective. Philosophies about back to nature, politics, myths etc. Like attracts like. The emotional charge and the willingness to act in line with the story is enhanced. 
It is like watching a movie and being totally absorbed into it. 

But it is just a dream!
Just a dream. 
A story created in my sleep, an imagination.

In reality there is no split between man and nature. How could that be? How could anything in the universe be separate form all the rest? As if a wall could eliminate the sky above it and the earth under it. 
And psychological suffering is not the quintessence of life. There is so much more. 

Things just are what they are. The stories and emotions around them are creations from our mind and the dream-voice. The story gives the illusion of a kind of coherence between all those things who just are. But it is a very limited coherence. It has nothing to do with the real fabrics of life. 

I think it is time to get out of that movie theater, close the book, finish the story and return to the real world.
Though stories are nice, may be I can make make a better one....or die ... and wake up from the storytelling time.

In an antique shop I found a box of pastel crayons. Now trying them out I feel the energy and ambiance of the former owner. He or she used an amazing pallet of pink and skin tones. I have got the impression that it was a man who loved to draw nudes. The colors  are very inspiring.

This transformed two unfinished paintings. The first is acrylic on canvas and 65 x 90 cm. The second is in oil on canvas and 50 x 60 cm.
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This oil painting came in many different stages. It took me several months to finish it. It seems/ feels somehow to be a transformative power in itself, in what it shows and in how it developed  on my canvas..  it is 1.20 x 90 cm.

The stars are also there when I don’t see them.
The memory of ancient forests is carried by the earth and the stones.
The humming bees and singing birds from long ago still have an echo.
The weather comes an goes.

in my heart the wind is not that strong today
more like the calmness after a storm.
Though not that cold, the stillness of winter gets to the bones.
When I listen carefully in a quiet late night I can hear the stars even indoors.

De dood ademt in mijn nek.
Zoals het bekende November gevoel, maar toch een beetje anders.
De dood van mijn dromen, wetende dat zij mij alleen maar trachten af te leiden
van die stille getuige binnenin,
wat naar mij kijkt als een dode masker met lege ogen, zonder enig verlangen.
De veroudering kraakt in mijn botten.
Maar ondanks de kille vingers van November met haar vochtig verdriet heb ik lief.

A new blog with a collection of notebook fragments to work with may be at some point or maybe not. To create new worlds, new forms and colours, new meaning.
In a mixture of languages, as that mix has become my daily reality. Hope you understand.