Excerpts from Art/Cure: Mental Pain and Aesthetic Experience. By Michelle

—my ḥāla—

The unconscious is accessed by seeing without the eyes. In the dream state, or the unconscious, there is a collapse of opposites, a removal of concepts and non concepts, allowing for “true dialogue.” From there, an impulse to express inner ideas and emotions emerges, with the creation’s medium or image acting as a bridge to the unconsciousness. Art gives recognition for the immense capability of individual creative insight as a means of healing their relationship with worldly and other-worldly (metaphysical and spiritual) "objects/nouns" and "non-objects" (including emotions, dreams, visions, auditory, visual, touch, taste . . . sensory "matter"), as well as the individual’s mending and understanding of their relationship with self, and beyond self. Within many different religions, there is the universal concept of a creator of higher power. If creation is fundamental to this higher power, then what are we to do but just that? Individually, we are constantly world making, creating our environment with our thoughts and perceptions, in what we allow ourselves to see or think. 

There was a time where I was detached, watching myself experience life. I collected from my experiences, documenting and creating images, internally desperate to feel like I could grasp my consciousness. 

Art is involuntarily born out of a dramatic force. In the restless urge to create, necessity itself becomes clear. 

Dreams and the unconscious connect us to questions we can't really express. It is possible to take on another kind of thinking, where something weaves itself into the psyche, and in thinking through images, one can come to realize pain in relation to something that answers and inspires. Something impossible becomes possible through the unconscious. A change of state occurs.

Being between conscious and unconscious, in two realities, I could see what I could not before, but not with the eyes. 

When conscious there is a separation between the rational and emotional. The rational is put more on a pedestal, validated as more objective and accurate. On the contrary, it is harder to prove and express the emotional side of being human.

In this unconsciousness there is a collapsing of concepts, allowing the contact of contradictions and idas otherwise unnoticed. Dreams and the unconscious can never be interpreted completely, and in this other kind of reality, they can mean more than we can understand.

“True dialogue,” allows different perspectives to interact, without being forced into a binary or singular viewpoint. This way of thinking is accessed in between consciousness. 

We may be more than one person, and through experiences in the unconscious we are given access to different deeper concealed parts of ourselves which manifests there. When we wake up from a dream we are not the same person (Freud), and in dreams we see something that gives us a message. 

“Dreaming is not ‘another way of experiencing another world,’ but ‘the radical way of experiencing one’s own world’” (Foucault) because when dreaming you are unconscious the mind is able to be free and radical, uninhibited by the conscious self.

From creation, I was doing an act of my own world building.

A soul can struggle, but also show potential for growth and new awareness. Secrets can be expressed but not explained, not everything needs or can have a definite explanation. 

In this disillusionment, reality is kept together and reconstructed through images. Destruction of a world can free a creative impulse. “Reason” itself can be destroyed and reconstructed in meaning. 

I expanded my own universe.

I disintegrated and created my new reality. 

In imagining the world otherwise, I accepted images which were once delusional as true, and my universe was recreated.