Metanoia

There exists a hidden, private-essentially secret-bundle of images and associations that are personal to each of us. Metanoia: Meditations on a Dream Sequence deals exclusively with these associat ...

There exists a hidden, private-essentially secret-bundle of images and associations that are personal to each of us. Metanoia: Meditations on a Dream Sequence deals exclusively with these associations, their domains and meanings, which tend to be abstract, symbolic, superficially realistic, and at times prophetic. Metania-means rebirth, regeneration, changes of mind or heart. It is a voice from the soul, or conscience reflecting the nature of who we wish to become. We are drawn to it without knowing why, though feeling the impulse to return is compelling and the result nourishing. It is our unvarnished state of being, a place to re-equilibrate and find balance. Since all dream images relate to our unique experience and are not easily translated to others, permit me to share with you the visual dynamic born from the process of creating this book. My view is not meant to replace your personal reactions, but merely to offer you another way of seeing. Though a photojournalist for over thirty years, I began this project by ignoring the conditioned tendency to read and analyze these photographs in a literal, journalistic manner through location and identity. Instead, I allowed the images to resonate as picture words or hieroglyphs. Experience and reading indicated that men's dreams are populated mostly by male characters representing masculine character traits, while women's dreams are peopled equally by both genders balancing masculine and feminine character traits. Intuition guided me to edit the photographs into masculine/feminine pairs on facing pages: masculine left and feminine right, where the distinction applied. (Traditional masculine traits are writing, spoken language, math, reasoning and scientific skills, while feminine traits include insight, imagination, spatial skills, art, and music.) Having done this, I still wondered why there was an imbalance in men's dreams. Perhaps it was because dreams reflect the cultural, and ours shows a bias toward a male-dominant thinking paradigm. Over time, this male dominance casts a strong shadow on the collective unconscious-which is that part of our unconscious shared by a community. Another way of saying this: history informs the underlying context of our dreams.