Here's a little warning sign if you have a cocaine problem

You have this dream and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and can't fall asleep and you're doing cocaine in your sleep and you can't fall asleep and you wake up and you're doing cocaine ... bingo.

(Robin Williams, when he was good).
I remember being kind of addicted to tetris, you know, when you're falling asleep and the bricks start falling behind your eyelids as they sag.

Art dreams, too, there's that.

Dream: 22/8/08

I made a massive cake that was an artwork. The cake was about my height, and it was round, like the chocolate cakes I used to make as a child. It was chocolate and it had cream in the middle. made it outside, and people watched me. I sliced it into ten pieces, or twelve. The division of the cake was a kind of performance.

Unfortunately people started eating the cake. I was alarmed, first that they were wrecking the work, and then realising they might be poisoned, but then I realised the main ingredient was flour so it was OK. I had to work out how to make a cake that would be more hardy and last longer, so I did research on how to combine the flour with more permanent materials. I used a huge cream filled cake-icer thing to make the curly cream shapes between the two layers of cake. The cream was made of a heated liquid plastic that cooled as soon as you applied it. At some point the cake became a pie and the cream went on top of it as though it were tomato sauce.

Now I'm hungry.

I don't feel like being an artist this week.

ION

I just found orange Fimo in my doona.

Thing is, I haven't made any orange objects on my bed.

Spooooky.

I'm manifesting my Fimo dreams into material reality.

I dreamt about Fimo again last night. I had little beige bits that I was slicing up on my desk. It was naturalistic and earthworks-y. In my dream I was happy.

Anyway. Better get on with it.

Dream 11/2/08

When I closed my computer to go to sleep, the review I'd been drafting was automatically posted on Facebook, in all its notes-y, drafty glory. By the time I woke up, everyone in the world had read my draft and knew all about what I *really* think.

Dream 4/2/08

I have moved to Melbourne. I move in with Teigan and his gf, who is in fact my very short, wacky and extroverted playwright friend Van. She makes her living reading tarot cards in the street. She has a wig on and glasses. Their home is full of sixties design furniture and very intellectual books I haven't read, and their conversations are very involved and lively. Fitzroy, where they live, is unbelievably busy and exciting. I buy bread two doors up from our house. You can just break off what you need and they sell you that. You can buy just a few mouthfuls of a bread roll if that's all you want. The freshness and quality of the food is incredible. The girl at the bakery makes friends with me and walks me around for a while. We go to an improbably happening Turkish or Hungarian bar full of young people dressed as Berlin Communists circa 1930s. They are all dancing to loud, frenetic music. I watch from outside. After, they chat to me and are very friendly, giving me ethnic sweets to eat. I keep walking, feeling like I am somewhere wonderful I cannot appreciate. I meet people on the streets who are all young and interesting and want to talk to me, but it feels lonely. I realise there must be artists I know here, but I don't know where they are. I put a token in a street vending machine and it spits out hundreds of yellow counters. You can redeem them at a couch shop, but it is a scam and you don't get anything for your money. I am balanced on a gate and it tumbles off its hinges to the ground. I realise I have made a terrible mistake moving here. I wonder if it is too late to move back home before the winter comes.

Dream 30/1/2008

I was on a journey with my parents and a friend, I can't remember who. It was on some kind of train, like a carnival ride (a ghost or love train). I realised after a while that we were going to the arctic circle on some kind of tour that was part party. My parents were excited about it. We each had a certain amount of rations including hot drinks in a thermos. I had warm clothes for the weather. We arrived in bitter cold at dusk at the base of a frozen cliff face by a frozen stream. All was white. There was a kind of protected area of rock. Our very old, gnarled but tough and strong leader began to haul up poles and stretching membranes over them to make some kind of geodesic dome for shelter. It was surprisingly warm and cosy. The atmosphere and camraderie among the travellers was very strong and positive, and there was a sense that a great adventure was being undertaken.

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My blog has got heaps suckier lately. It's not specific enough. Gotta work on that.

Must. Push. Envelope.

I had this great idea for an exhibition today as I was walking down Cleveland St on my dinner break. Well, I thought it was great at the time, I still think it's very fine. In about 24 hours I'll think it's really banal. In about two weeks I'll know if it's stupid. If I still want to do it in six months it might get done. So entrenched is the procrastination; so essential is the forward planning.

Anyway. My idea. [Oh - it's been all built up now.] I would hire a visual merchandiser to install the works for me in the best way that they could. In a window space, of course. They could use whatever fancy techniques they have. I would give them a bunch of Fimo objects and off they could go. And I could, like, audition different people by asking them to describe on the phone what it is they do. I could record what they're saying and then make a wowie zowie superficial and graphic animation that would illustrate what they're saying. This video would show all by itself inside the gallery.

I think I'm going to pitch this to someone. I like it.

My art ideas are like dreams and my dreams are like art ideas. I suppose that's because both happen in my head.

Ho hum.

I have been thinking a lot about Adrian Mole lately, the TV show specifically. I really think it was very good.

Ooh, I. Ooh, I. Ooh, I. Ooh, I (just know that something good is gonna happen)

So I decided tonight that I am, big-picture-wise, on track for my upcoming show, and that even if it's not as good as I wanted or not as much work made as I had planned, it is only to the degree that it is always like that and therefore normal.

I will still have to work my 'ass' off all week but that's OK, I'm in the zone now and it finally feels OK. Unsolved problems notwithstanding.

In other news, I saw Mitch at a party the other night and told him about the dream that starred him in the lead role. It totally freaked him out - I barely know him. Now I think he's scared of me. I am the weird inappropriate chick. I thought it was just going to be an unusually good icebreaker at the party... but I don't regret my candidness. If he can't handle starring in the dreams of random strangers ... Naw, bless 'im, e's all right.

See, nothing can taint the good mood this moment.

Dream 25/7/2007

Mitch Cairns has a series of huge shows as an immensely successful artist. I attend an artists' talk at his National Gallery of Australia survey show in Canberra. He is clumsy and inarticulate and utterly charms everyone, including me. His works keep breaking and falling off the wall but somehow this seems to be part of what they're supposed to be like. He stresses out and takes off - I try to follow/find him through all that labyrinthine concrete architecture. No-one else is around. I realise the gallery is a space station, which strangely relaxes me because at least the art scene has disappeared.

Sorry Mitch, I don't know that this has anything to do with you. I can only claim the license of unconsciousness.

Dream 30/6/07: Portrait of my father as a blue budgie

I am in a travelling prize exhibition where the work is about birds, specifically budgies. I have proposed a certain work and my proposal has been accepted but I haven't made the work yet. We travel together to the location of the show; somewhere distant, tropical? Luke Shelley and others from the gosford emerging show are there. I am making four budgies (out of fimo) who will sit on a single perch inside of a white, round fimo cage. It will be some kind of metaphor for a family. Other people are installing the work in an atmosphere of friendly camaraderie and i am sitting on the floor making mine. I start with a yellow bird but soon realise that a canary is not the same as a budgie and have to start again. The next one I make is blue, and I find it hard to make a realistic shape of the bird's body; also, i keep finding real wings and feathers in my work, which annoys me ... it's supposed to be fimo. I get stuck into it and am amazed at the forms I can construct. Then I realise the bird I've made is much too large and I have to make it smaller. Then I realise it can be the 'father' bird so it's ok.

Waking up late dreams 10/6/07

First, some of my friends picked me up, held me aloft and dance-carried me upstairs in a huge abandoned warehouse. They put me in front of a window from where I could see a bunch of boys who were a geeky crew in my primary school were dancing, totally kitsch Broadway jazz-style, fantastically choreographed, in relay up the road, performing just for my benefit. I was happy and laughing.

Then, I was on holiday in Bavarian summertime when everyone realised that the planet had just been invaded. Large Vogon-like creatures appeared and made an announcement that from now on we were all going to be rounded up and controlled and spied on and that was that. They made everyone get out of the swimming pool and line up, like squashed flat against one another, and to march towards some particular destination. Shinmi was crying and I held her hand to comfort her. I said "I think we have to do what they say" and we all started filing towards whatever place they wanted, probably some kind of work camp. We kept stepping on each others' feet as there was no space between us. We marched past some old industrial buildings that had been converted into a film set and we could see people inside still talking to each other and not marching; resisting? I jumped out of my line and snuck inside; they had been having some party so everyone had wine. Rachel and Holly were there on a shoot and we all hugged. The film people were trying to work out what to do. I felt very strongly that it was the end of everything.

Dream 31/12/2006

I went to see the Blake Prize for Religious Art exhibition. There were about 150 works on show. Adrian Hobbs had made a kind of karaoke video with Chris Hanrahan and other artists lipsynching to a Christmas song. The production values were unbelievably high but all the singing was out of synch. I realised that most artworks could be seen as having spiritual or religious content and began planning my own entry for next year; a large-scale cartoony Breughel-esque (Paul Noble-y in scale) drawing of bricks dressed as people undertaking their everyday activities in a series of fenced, conjoined circular areas about the size of above-ground swimming pools. The brick-people would have faces, arms and legs, and would be doing things that happen in the lives of ordinary suburban people. Two would be getting married; a teenage one would be cutting herself; stuff like that.