Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Number Dream
1968
Oil, Acrylic, Ink and Letters on Canvas
73 1/2 x 73 1/2 inches

Comments: That the physical senses can provide an authentic advancement in knowledge is a truism. Dreams also can provide an advancement in knowledge. But the assumption is often held that knowledge obtained from the senses is inherently objective and that knowledge from visions and dreams is inherently subjective.

Anyone who has ever witnessed the work of a really good stage magician or who has conversed at length with a psychotic or a psychopath learns very quickly about selective perception at its extreme, concerning oneself or others.
True objectivity is the goal of Ancient Wisdom (the process that creates the integration of all knowledge and in doing so reveals its own principles of organization). On the one hand, what we have come to call science (methodological sensation) is one half of ancient wisdom and has been revived over the past 300 years. On the other hand, the visionary (or methodological revelation) has been eclipsed by the technological achievements of science to such an extent that we have experienced only the historical shards of its former integration, in concepts such as the A Priori of Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804), or practices such as astrology, the I Ching, the Yogas, or the Kabbalah, etc.

There is, however, one form of the visionary that was revived as a creative practice by artists of the International Symbolist Movement (active between 1880- 1910). The interpretation of dreams utilizes the discovery in the west (about 1893) of Tantric art and its use of what we call today as lucid dreaming. This hint was picked up by the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1940) when he wrote the own Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. He did however ignore the idea that one could be aware of the dream state while dreaming.

Carl Jung (1875-1961), the disciple of Freud, absorbed to a greater extent the doctrines of Tantra. He used the prime symbol of Tantric art- the Mandala (circle with center and periphery) to analyze human nature and, in particular, dreams.
Surrealism (1917- 1943)- the dream- oriented art movement that developed from Freud's work via the ideological control of the poet Andre Breton (1896- 1966), became the means to subtend the interpretation of dreams to appear to be derived from scientific bases only and not the visionary.

In my painting "The Number Dream," I favor the influence of Jung over Freud and the Surrealists, but I also find Jung's ideas about dreams limited in other ways. For instance, Jung's theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, as forces that alter dream imagery, are confined to extent of human history. I believe not. I think the archetypes are inherent within the "basic stuff" of the universe. Mass and consciousness are but two of the expressions of the primordial.

As an example, on October 25, 1995 I was shown images taken directly from the orbital Hubble space radio- telescope. The telescope was aimed at areas of sky free from optically received light. What the telescope did access, however, were the leading ends of light rays approximately 7000 light years from earth, that had been generated 2 billion years after the "Big Bang." When I saw the images of monstrous star gas clusters light years in extent I was astounded, not only because they resembled nothing that we associate with out present day universe (that is: 15 billion years after the "Big Bang"), but also because I had seen these exact images years ago in a lucid dream. This was personal proof to me that dreams can yield an advancement in knowledge and process information prior to the existence of human life or any life as we have come to define the term. That we are born of stardust or have stardust memories may be more fact than poetic metaphor.

I prefer the platonic notion of the archetypes (forms that are timeless but whose appearance can batter time) especially as presented by Plato's nephew Speussippus (c. 407- 339 B.C.) who assumed leadership of the academy at the death of his uncle in 387 B.C. It was Speussippus who believed the forms were numbers in the Pythagorean sense. As an example he stated that the one is a basic principle in which, in conjunction with divine reason, produces the good. Speussippus, who often accompanied his uncle on his travels to other lands, felt the visual elegance of Arabic numerals, he saw in the Hejaz and the Nejd, was the best mode of representing the forms.

What I have done is establish a system of presenting my dreams based on Tantric, Jungian, and Speussippusian concepts (my system is very similar to the one developed by Edmund Husseral [1859- 1938] in his book The Philosophy of Arithmetic [1891] in which we came to understand numbers in terms of the essences of the numbering concepts which consciousness has produced). The space division of the dream- space yields 70 parts: "The Wheel of Fortune" based Neptunian principles:

1) A total square is divided into 9 squares;
2) Two circles are established: inside the large square (the periphery) and inside the smaller
central square (the center);
3) Quadripartites of diagonals and a cross are drawn;
4) A special way of drawing the first 9 integers based on Speussippus' system of utilizing 90° and
45° angles;
5) Different size circles (the symbol of wholeness in diversity) are drawn inside the 70 divided spaces. The
relative diameters determine the relative importance of one scene of the dream over another;
6) The dream (any dream) can be divided into 54 scenes (Mercury- communication 5 and Uranus- the
Hidden 4), including 16 blank out periods (the shattered citadel- a warning to avoid a strange
fatality);
7) There is a linear sequence of scenes from a discovered beginning to a discovered ending. But the scenes
fold back upon themselves giving the appearance of a random sequence. The central square of the
dream space seems to be the point of entry into the dream sequence, and a dream, like all
representations of a journey, is entered in medias res in the midst of things.