The Dreamer | Nancy Jackson

THE DREAMER

1988

Accompanying text was inspired and derived from

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

and

The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer

Twelve Paintings 6.75" x 5", gouache on paper

The Dreamer - Adam Rudolph, composer

A twelve-part opera based on the paintings and text was composed by Adam Rudolph in 1990

This is the first of the twelve music segments which accompany each painting.
(The slideshow can be viewed while music is playing).
The Dreamer music (Total time 56min) can be purchased from Apple Music.

  • The Dreamer 1
    The dreamer seeks the dream for from this illusion there rises, like the fragrance of
    ambrosia, a new illusory world, invisible to those enmeshed in the first.
  • The Dreamer 2
    There is need of a whole world of torment in order for the individual to produce the redemptive vision,
    to sit quietly in a tossing rowboat in the middle of the sea, absorbed in contemplation.
  • The Dreamer 3
    Our intense longing for illusion brings us a radiant vision of pure delight and
    painlessness, a rapt seeing through wide open eyes.
  • The Dreamer 4
    Yet again and again our willing, our memory of personal objectives,
    distracts us, pulls us from the illusion of the dream.
  • The Dreamer 5
    We can imagine the dreamer calling out, still caught in the illusion of the dream
    and without disturbing it: “This is a dream and I want to go on dreaming!”
  • The Dreamer 6
    And the next scene of beauty we behold will yield us up once more to pure ideation.
  • The Dreamer 7
    For it is the lot of the dream to creep gradually into the narrows of personal fact,
    and to be treated by some later time as a unique event of history.
  • The Dreamer 8
    The tragedy at the heart of things is an interplay of divine and human will, each individually valid,
    but each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its own strength.
  • The Dreamer 9
    They sank away slowly, and their children, fairer than they,
    stood before their dying eyes, lifting up their heads in eagerness.
  • The Dreamer 10
    Yet they too will age and die, and the truth, once seen, brings upon us a consciousness of the dreadful
    absurdity of being. In this supreme jeopardy of the will, we demand above all else a deliverance from the self,
    a silencing of personal will and desire. Our very ground of being has need of vision and illusion to redeem itself.
  • The Dreamer 11
    The image which now reveals to us our oneness with the heart of the world is a
    dream scene showing vividly the original pain and the original delight of illusion.
  • The Dreamer 12
    No longer the dreamer, we have ourselves become a dream.
    The productive power of all nature reveals itself now in this transport.

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