4. THE PAINTER

The following is the dream of a businessman:

I dreamt I was in a large house, a mansion as it's called, and there was an exhibition of paintings and drawings there in a series of large rooms. The artist was a man called Sczabo-- and I remember this very clearly: S-c-z-a-b-o-- a name that means absolutely nothing to me. And yet the paintings, the drawings of animals, seemed familiar.

And then I was in another large room, outside the exhibition. There were a lot of people there, and it was obvious we were getting ready for a cocktail party. A man came up to me and said, 'What costume, what cloak are you going to wear?' He starts to hand me a painter's smock. I say, 'No, that's not me.'

(From Marie-Louise von Franz, in Fraser Boa, The Way of the Dream: Covnersations on Jungian Dream Interpretation with Marie-Louise von Franz, Shambhala, 1994, p. 84).

Commentary on the Dream (HRM)

When he was asked about the meaning of the man handing him a smock, the dreamer replied that he didn't paint. He said that the paintings are a metaphor for "all the writing I should have done and haven't done. The smock is probably the costume I should be wearing if I were going to get serious about some of the things I should do."

As often in dreams, the "house" here seems to represent the self, but the important point is that it is repeatedly described as a large house ("a mansion, as it's called"), with a series of large rooms. In other words, there is plenty of room in this house for new possibilities ("In my Father's house are many mansions"). The house is where an exhibition of paintings is taking place, and the paintings, drawings of animals, "seemed familiar."

There is profound sense in which the self-to-be, the "person I was meant to be," is already quite familiar to us, yet at the same time strange and unknown-- as in the name "Szcabo" in this dream ("a name that means absolutely nothing to me").

Then the scene shifts to another "large room." The dreamer is asked about what costume he should wear and is handed a painter's smock, which he rejects. A painter's smock, of course, is not at all the dress appropriate for a cocktail party, so it is reasonable that the dreamer would reject it. But his rejection takes an emphatic form: "No, that's not me."

The dreamer's own interpretation is somewhat linear and literalistic, even moralistic. He has in mind that he should have been doing more writing and so the details of interpretation follow from that fixed point of view. But the dream itself is more ambiguous. The unknown painter ("Sczabo") creates images that are already familiar to the dreamer, like the images of the dream itself. But the smock, the costume of a painter, is something that the dreamer in the end resolutely rejects: "No, that's not me."

In Rembrandt's magnificent self-portraits, done virtually every year of his adult life, we see the painter dressed up in various costumes at different points in his career: the smock of a workaday painter, the elegant dress of gentleman, finally in the later self-portraits, the costume seems to recede in importance altogether as our attention becomes focused on the face and the eyes.

In the same way, the images of the dreamworld represent the production of an unknown creative force within us ("Szcabo") whose creations are nonetheless familiar. The costume we adopt is like the persona or mask we put on in order to meet the outer world: a necessary adaptation, but not necessarily the true self ("No, that's not me.") We cannot be sure whether the dreamer in this case is telling himself that he ought to be doing more writing, or perhaps just the opposite-- that writing, like painting, is just one more mask of the self.