More Dreaming
This is a sort of follow-up to my previous post on the subject of dreaming, but also of yesterday’s post, where I talked about photographs and memory.
Why do I take photographs? Because I can’t draw. This is perhaps the only thing I share with Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative / positive process which has been the basis of photography for most of its history:
Though some of his pictures show a measure of artistic taste, it was his inability to draw which caused him to experiment with a mechanical method of capturing and retaining an image.
I can relate to that, although I suspect that my lack of drawing ability is more fundamental. 
The websites I looked at refer to his difficulties with drawing scenery, I also read in Flora Photographica (a superb collection of flower photography) that he wanted to record his botanical specimens, and was therefore the first flower photographer.
In my flower photographs, I am more and more conscious of their links to dreams and mental images. Sometimes the idea for a picture comes to me as a complete image long before I take it, and I then attempt to arrange flowers or other objects to resemble what I have already seen in my dreams. At other times, images appear in the process of taking the picture, which it seems to me I have dreamed into existence.
What I can’t easily do (as I can’t draw) is record as images dreams like the one I had last night. I was beside a shallow river, with grassy banks (there’s a lot more about how I got there, but this is the important part). In small pools at the river’s edge there floated numbers of dead songbirds, small brown birds lying stretched out on the water with their wings folded and their white throats exposed. As I knelt down to examine the birds more closely, thick clay-like mud clung to my hands and threatened to suck me down into the riverbed. Time to wake up!
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