Arthur: Do you “use” dreams to solve personal problems, work problems…? To break through on something that’s proving difficult.
RV: Oh yeah. Essentially any kind of personal issue I’m dealing with, I’ll start monitoring my dreams, trying to figure it out. I will sometimes just ask myself, before going to bed, “What’s going on with this? I don’t understand it. I want to know more.” And I begin to interpret dream imagery in the context of whatever problem I’m dealing with.
The nature of dreams is that they are healing. They tend to compensate for when you’re off-kilter. They want to get you back, centered, and, y’know, feeling right with the world. So when you’re really screwed up, that’s when they start screaming the loudest at you.
That’s a great way to approach them—if you have a really scary dream, or a really upsetting dream… Some people, their first response is “Oh, it’s affirmation that I’m crazy, or something terrible is going to happen to me.” It’s just the opposite. If your own psychology is bringing you these mental pictures, it’s because it wants to get you healthy. Pay a little attention, just listen to what it’s got to say, and over the course of time those horrible pictures will tone down and get you right back to where you need to be.
It’s a skill that really should be taught, and something I think that’s missing in our culture.
Arthur: How would you teach it?
RV: Well, first off you need to get people collecting their dreams, sharing their dreams—and this is something that tribal cultures have always done—but our rational, industrial culture kind of pooh-poohs all this stuff. Or they see it as Freudian mumbo-jumbo, but it’s not—it’s how we’re wired. We should teach people about how the structure of their own psyches just like we teach them about their bodies.
Arthur: Dreams really are regarded to consciousness or well-being in the way that ‘junk DNA’ is regarded to DNA… they exist, but they are irrelevant.
RV: Our society is based on rationalism and scientism and it downplays intuition. But intuition is GREAT.
Arthur: When did you find out about the local Native Americans?
RV: Well they started to appear in that first important series of dreams that I was telling you about. What I learned later on as I began to research the history of that area in 1994 or 95, when this stuff really began to come together, in ways that astounded me… I was getting bits and places of it… You know, Indians camped out at this one spot up the river. There was this one bridge downtown—right below this bridge there were these old Indian carvings. What I didn’t realize was those Indian carvings were the classic shaman symbols… the circle with two horns, the eyes and the mouth. There were dozens of them down there. A lot of ‘em got destroyed in colonial times.
What I found out when I began to research it in libraries was this was the place where all the tribes gathered, because the salmon got caught there—there were falls up above—so at certain times of the year the chad and the salmon would come in. All the tribes would come. All the shamans would get together and start doing mushrooms. The carvings they left are records of the visions. [chuckles]
I found this extraordinary…I was having cosmic dreams about this area, as all this was coming up… One time in a dream, I was looking down on this place where the carvings are and I raised my line of vision and I saw the globe of Earth floating above it with all the ley lines illuminated on it. And then I looked up above that and there was a globe of the Cosmos, the whole universe, with more glowing lines connecting stars. Showing me that there was a connection: the universe—the planet—this one spot.
All Rick Veitch artwork is copyright Rick Veitch.
All photography by Brooke Sietinsons.
Rich Veitch’s blog is at rickveitch.com
Veitch’s dream comics books are available from his store.
Other Rick Veitch works are available from Amazon.
Arthur’s highest recommendation goes to Veitch’s Can’t Get No. ( [Starred review.] “One of the most remarkable achievements in recent comics history.”- Publisher’s Weekly)
A new collection of Veitch’s controversial ’90s series “Brat Pack” will be in stores in mid-May. More information, including a free 32-page PDF preview, available from rickveitch.com
Special thanks to Arthur’s Man in Manchester, John Coulthart.
Comments
Dear Jay:
Excellent interview with Rick! I have worked from my own dreams for more than 30 years and I believe that this interview should be shared with folks around the world especially new artists who so often do not understand the power of things like dreams as applied to writing and drawing etc.
I contributed one of my own dreams to Rick’s series and he has been kind enough to draw himself into my Winged Tiger series.
I have long believed that this type of material needs to be seen by more mainstream audiences so that this comic book (graphic novel) art form that Rick and so many of us practice and love can reach out past just the die hard fanboys in the United States.
Comics can be so much more than superheroes.
Again, congrats on this great piece.
Phil
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