Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

It Came from Beneath Space
1993
Oil, Acrylic, Ink, lettering on Canvas
61 1/2 x 98 1/2 in.

Subject: Belmont, Massachusetts Transposed to Belmont, California

Symbol Evocation: The Inverse of the Miracle

Comments: This depicts my 52nd lucid dream. The painting is in the form of a Golden Rectangle, which is then subdivided into eight squares that diminish logarithmically (the so-called whirling squares of Phi). Phi is the general concept that unites such elements as (1) the Golden Rectangle, (2) the Golden Proportions .382…/.618…, (3) the logarithmic spiral observed in nature, and (4) the Fibonacci number series: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55,…etc, also observed in nature. Phi is the principle of continuity of life and death in nature.

The largest square to the left is the actual subject matter of my lucid dream (lucid dreaming means being aware of the fact that you are dreaming while you are dreaming). The subject is about my mother and our family home in Belmont, Massachusetts, eight (the 7th Fibonacci number) miles west of Boston, that has been transposed to Belmont, California twenty-one (the 9th Fibonacci number) miles southeast of San Francisco. The transposing agent was a single out-take I once saw from the science-fiction horror movie, It Came from beneath the Sea (1955) in which an enraged mutant octopus is so large that it believes it can pull down the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though this dream is ostensibly about my mother, the date of the dream is December 20th- my father's birthday.

The remaining seven squares to the right are concerned with the theory of lucid dreaming as an aspect of mind-physics (which describes the continuity between the subjective and the objective-consciousness and mass in nature). Ontologically lucid dreaming is the inverse of the concept of the miracle. In lucid dreaming the will so strengthens the ego, that the ego is able to violate the natural order (the waking state) and draw some contents of the subconscious into manifestation (a tulpa) or a degree of embodiment. In contrast, a miracle (such as the spontaneous healing of the body) is defined as the will so weakening the ego, that the ego is able to violate the natural order (the waking state) by withdrawing into the subconscious as a timeless state of pure revelation.

I recently have begun to read The Enneads of the New-Platonic philosopher/mystic Plotinus (AD 204-270) and realized that the second largest square in the painting which I have entitled The Totality of Existence is Absolute is a diagrammatic cognate of Plotinus' system of divinity seen as a graded triad: (1) The One, or the first existent, (2) The Divine Mind, or the Nous or Logos, and repository of the Platonic forms, and (3) The All-Soul, or the first and only principle of life. My diagram was an attempt to place lucid dreaming within the largest context possible, subsuming what I believed to be the systems of Plato, Shankara, Sogaku Marada, Freud and Jung (all seminal philosophers of the mind) and I fell right into the open hands of Plotinus.