Reverie (n.)
To drift, to muse, dérive, where an unplanned journey through a landscape, or a mindscape allows us to wander into a place of lucidity and clarity, where we can dream with open eyes (Tucker) Originally reuerye from the mid-14c, meaning to frolic, then the Old French as reverie meaning delirium and to the modern French rêverie where now we dream and we wander (wonder) in a state of mind, absent yet present, in the moment?
In his book Dreaming With Open Eyes Michael Tucker contests that the artist is the living bridge to alternative planes of consciousness. He described the artist as a modern day Shaman and suggested that the ritual of ‘art making’ itself has the potential for trance like states of arousal and imagination. Jackson Pollock and his mural drip paintings and their referencing of the Native American sand painters of the West and the Abstract Expressionists in general were keen to propagate the notion that the function of art was to “re establish a lost contract with the unconscious… and to keep and develop this contract in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind” (Tucker) Does Reverie in some way occupy a space between these states? A state from which we can be wakened even though we are not sleeping, and where the suddenness of us re-entering the living world on being awakened is often disturbing and intrusive? And because the idea of the moment or momentariness (sic) is implicit to reverie and because this is usually defined as something fleeting, something over in a flash, it then becomes desirable to preserve it, to stay in the moment, to stay in that place, in that state for longer? Might this be the profound boredom that Heidegger refers to in Being and Time? An elusive state in which Heidegger believed is essential to worthwhile and profitable thinking, not distracted by the ephemeral and the transient incarnations of a lived world that can so insidiously occupy us?
Philosopher Karl Popper said “Our theories (and ideas) are our own inventions; but they may be merely ill reasoned guesses, bold conjectures, hypotheses. Out of these we create a world, not the real world, but our own nets in which we try to catch the real world” (Popper p60). And perhaps this is what we do when we are in rêverie and we abstract and contemplate the lived world…casting our nets, in our own fashion, to catch something of ‘our’ own particular real world.