Meat Loaf

Last night while at a party celebrating Urban Chef, Reese and I laughed with a long time friend about his movie rental matrix. What's amazing to me is how different minds think. The process of the brain that puts information together in matrix form to make decisions is, to me, astounding. My brain doesn't work like this.

Nils was a little embarrassed. He said that he recently read an article presenting that the best way to make decisions is to sleep on it. So, these days, instead of making matrices, he prefers to make decisions after a good night of sleep.

I've often thought that dreams are the subconscious working through problems on our behalf. Many times I have dreamed about something and woken up with a renewed sense of purpose and direction, particularly with regard to painting. This week, the dreams haven't been so beneficial to solving problems. It's been a week of cluelessness. The grand ideas are still grand, but as of now, unattainable. Perhaps, I need more sleep.

Daydreams can be just as powerful. Just yesterday, while at lunch with a friend, I realized that I was staring at my friend's face, but not hearing a word she had said. There was an unresolved issue with a painting on which I had been working. As soon as I realized that I was mentally working to solve the painting "mistake," I stopped and refocused on my friend and our conversation. She must have noticed that I was daydreaming. She makes her living reading people; she's a therapist.

I could have used a good dream to help with today's efforts as well. First thing this morning, I prepared my palette. With grandiose ideas, I started mixing colors and applying thick paint to a large canvas. It was all wrong. I wiped that off, remixed more colors, started again...all wrong. Wiped it all off. Started a third time. Again, just not right. After wiping all the paint off for a third time, I decided it best to get out the pastels to sketch the image before painting. That's as far as I got today. I'm looking forward to sweet dreams tonight.