While in art school in the 1980’s noted book artist and wood engraver George A. Walker had to keep a visual dream diary for one of classes. The assignment was simple- set your alarm clock every evening and when it goes it off in the morning “set to paper whatever fragments could be salvaged…before the fanciful thoughts dissipated in the harsh glare of dawn”
Some 25 years later George A. Walker is still keeping his diary. Not only is he recording his dreamscapes on paper but he is producing an accompanying wood engraving! Walker says his “dream diary is a record of the most surreal and visually absurd sequential inner narratives distilled into single images.”
Images from the Neocerebellum, published by The Porcupine’s Quill, brings together a sampling of these images with the related diary entry. Walker’s introduction offers a brief historical overview of artists’ who have created work to explore their unconscious dream state and how the practice of wood engraving, the act of carving lines out of wood, is a conducive means of exploring one’s unconscious. The tree is, after all, as Walker reminds us, a ripe metaphor for the human condition with a presence both above and below ground.
The book also contains a postscript by Daryl Sharp, a Jungian analyst, tilted “A Jungian approach to Dreams and Dream Images.”
Warning: Reading this book will affect your sleep.
Here is a video of Walker in action: