Hypnogeography
There is a short quasi-fiction by that name in my prose collection, Doctor of Silence. When the painter Paul Hotvedt read the piece he was stirred to think and plan further, since the notions of the geography we see only in dream rimed with some of his own work as a meticulous and reverent scribe of the waking world he observes all around him in eastern Kansas. At his prompting, a local arts council organized a conference on Landscape and the Imagination. It took place in Lawrence in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, at a moment when the meaning and sanctity of place reigned in everybody’s thought. The text linked to below is my contribution – my insistence on the authenticity of landscape dreamt, and the importance of mapping it alongside the waking given.
[The proceedings of the whole conference were published as an issue of the Cottonwood Review. Incidentally, Hotvedt’s own website (http://www.paulhotvedt.net) offers innumerable visual examinations of landscape by him and a number of other artists, as well as links to the Ground Site project.]