Vision 9: Dream


Dream, trance, ecstasy, and unusual foresight are other synonyms for vision. When Mozart composed, he saw the whole work complete in his mind, able to be encompassed at a glance, with such finality that "committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is already finished." Paul Valery asserts that "to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees." The mystical component of vision is referred to in Mary Jean Norman's definition of art as "the difference between seeing and just identifying."


Vision can be revelation or imagination, a knowledge of something that is not in the world but ought to be. The compulsion may follow to turn the vision into a plan and realize it, whether it is the vision of an engineer who designs a new type of bridge or of a screenwriter who pitches a story. Now the vision is, in Annie Dillard's words, "a set of mental relationships, a coherent series of formal possibilities...Its structure is at once luminous and translucent; you can see the world through it."

There are dream visions and visionary dreams. The chemist August Kekule' dreamed of a snake-like chain of atoms. One of the snakes took its tail in its mouth and enabled him to visualize the construction of the benzene ring.( It has something to do with the molecular chemistry of aromatic compounds.)

Many concepts arrive in the minds of creative humans via hypnagogic images. Niels Bohr conceptualized the structure of the atom., Elias Howe invented the sewing machine, and the mathematician Poincare' visualized something called Fuchsian functions, all in dreams.

There are great minds, that can think great conceptual thoughts. There are other great minds, like Escher's, that are able to use the visual medium to show ordinary people abstract ideas in a way they can grok. One of the most honorable professions is to help other people understand things by means of elegant visual expressions. This noble calling is not limited to "artists" but includes people like physicist Richard Feynman. He is renowned for (among many other accomplishments) his Feynman diagrams, which are ways of visualizing stuff that few people even know exists. It's a shame that Feynman died before the technology of virtual reality got off the ground; I bet he would go nuts over the potential for helping people grasp complicated and unfamiliar concepts.

The camera in Until the End of the World, created to help the blind, is a dangerous tool, because it can also record dreams, which can then be shown to others in what may be the ultimate breach of privacy. Worse yet, a person can become addicted to viewing her own dreams over and over.

to Vision 10

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