This morning, I dreamt myself into a crowded stage: guests and friends gathered, fathers offering contradictory advice, a precarious carriage tipping over a gorge, passengers vanishing into a riverbed but leaving their gifts behind. When I woke, what remained were not the people but the unwrapped offerings — brushes, pencils, tools.
In Jungian analysis, the dream opened into something larger. My father’s voice revealed its old contradictions, but also its fading hold. The overloaded vehicle mirrored my recent collapse after too many days at the pool. And the gifts, stripped of their wrapping, spoke plainly: what endures is the work, the art, the making.
That thought carried me to my Hadrian’s Wall Triptych — still in progress, but already gathering symbolic weight. The Wall as boundary, the Tree as axis, the Sky as compass. Perhaps even a mirror shard embedded, so that others — and I — might see ourselves reflected. Perhaps even a relic, like the adolescent crucifix I wore in Majorca, emptied of faith but charged with memory.
In the end, what began as a dream of collapse became a meditation on legacy. The unconscious may be bottomless, but my role is simpler: to unwrap the gifts given me, to cut and recut the wall, to let the tree and the sky orient me. A triptych in print or wood, modest or monumental, may stand as one of those gifts passed on — a legacy of a kind.