All we see and seem are but a dream within a dream.

I have been thinking lately about perception and the possibility of parallelisms within our lives. Things seen and unseen. Dreams and what they signify.

The other day I came across a space on Oxford Road that is an art gallery, cafe, and movie theater all in one, run by the City Arts Council.

The exhibition was Japanese techno-artist Masaki Fujihata. He plays with lights and computer screens, false mirrors and shadows. There was nobody else in the galleries, and the effect was one of an eerie and metaphysical silence.

Fujihata's work "creates an effect of distancing or strangeness, akin to that of Brechtian theatre."

I immediately made a connection to the David Lynch films that I admire, especially with their Brechtian allusions and story within a movie within a dream within a nightmare within an acid trip. I also thought of Peter Weir and his "Picnic and Hanging Rock," one of my favorite movies. That movie opens with the Edgar Allen Poe poem being read aloud, as the picture comes into focus of a strangely red and mystical Australian dreamland.

"All we see and seem are but a dream within a dream."

Which leads to my remembering that I had my very vivid, recurring Tornado dream last night. I have dozens of these dreams every year, and have since childhood. They are exhilirating and terrifying, but never result in much actual destruction or anyone's death.

Sometimes I am face to face with a Tornado, staring it down along a lonely stretch of Mid Country highway. Sometimes there are multiple tornadoes, all around me. Last night I was with a friend, huddling in some sort of shed or guest house, watching the oncoming tornadoes approach from the window.

I know that the Freudians out there would recognize the inner turmoil that these dreams represent - self, sexuality, family, conflicting emotions, repressed feelings, buried anger. But perhaps there is more. Perhaps I am seeing visions of something to come. Or something that has already been.

One of the more intriguing pieces in the art exhibition was a "false mirror", an LED screen that had a pair of (real) sunglasses hanging from it. When you put the sunglasses on, and looked at the screen, you saw a mirror (in the display) and only the sunglasses looking back at you. It was odd and whimsical, and not in the least bit spooky. It made me think.

..." though the spectator may not see it, everything which is actualized in the virtual mirror by the movement of the spectator's viewpoint is a preliminary reconstruction outside time."

and ..." It is this shifting uncertainty between the present moment and the programmed past, between presence and absence, all occuring at once, which unsettles the spectator's sense of perception and reality..."

Perhaps we are all viewing some other possible past.