DREAM INTERVIEWS

JESSICA BOSTON (London, 1983)
digestivemovement.blogspot.com
Interview by Roger Omar

FIRST PART

-What relationship is there between cheese and your dreams?

It’s a very serious relationship. I absolutely love cheese more than anything, especially close to bedtime when I have decided to finish my diet for the day and enjoy myself. I try really hard not to because of obvious flabby repercussions, but I’m an addict. I think cheese is so important to my dreams and my life in general. I always notice that my dreams are extra special and vivid when I’ve had cheese for dinner or before a siesta nap. I find that different cheeses give different kinds of dreams. I usually eat Burgos, Mozzarella, Parmesan or Goat, but the good dreams come when I eat the really strong cheeses. I saw on this study that Cheddar enhances dreams about celebrities, Blue Cheese gives you crazy dreams, Red Leicester is likely to have you dwelling on the past and Lancashire will get you focused on the future.

-Why do you write down and illustrate your dreams?

I write them down because I want to remember them. I love having the memory of them, my memory isn’t great, and so I have to count on the dream diaries. When I was younger I used to keep a real diary but rereading them makes me cringe and they can never show how my state of mind is as much as my dreams show. I have been keeping a dream diary for about seven years now. I have extremely bright and colourful dreams, they are full of wonderful unexplainable things. When I read back my dream diaries I remember everything, the colours, the angles I saw the dream from, the places, the people, and how I felt the morning after I had the dream. Even when I reread dreams that happened ages ago I still see what I saw in the dream very clearly.

-Is what you write true to what you see in your dreams or does it get transformed?

Things do get lost by the morning sometimes if I wake up go to the loo or Nachi’s alarm will go off, I’ll fall back asleep which means I will lose a lot of detail. I don’t like to exaggerate or make things up or it would lose its truth and that is really important to me. I don’t want it to become fantasy I want it to stay honest, it would be fiction if I embellished and its not fiction or reality, its something else, something much more exciting. The problem  with writing down your dreams is that they are so hard to explain even with the drawings, because you can write down for example ‘I am at my house’, but first of all a lot of people haven’t been to my house and don’t know what its like, or it could be my house but at the same time, not be my house, or just feel like its my house… and when it comes to people and their personal details it can become very difficult because it can read for example ‘my friends husband’, but is it her husband in the dream or in real life? I don’t want to put brackets after everything I write because that can become heavy to read, so I just leave it open to interpretation.

-What part of your dreams get lost in the process of writing them down?

The dreams are never going to be a hundred percent accurate, but I am very disciplined about getting it all down when I wake up, in the first five minutes of waking you lose 50 percent of your dream and in the first ten minutes you will lose 90 percent of it. Small things do get lost, or sometimes I can’t remember the bit that connects one part of the dream to the other. I have four or five separate dreams a night and I fall back asleep and in the morning sometimes I forget a chunk of dream. When I wake up I usually go running to my computer and type like crazy everything I can remember. It’s like pulling a thread, I remember something and suddenly the whole dream falls into my head and I feel relieved. I like to spend the morning re-going through the dream. Every detail and trying to figure out what it was about. Even if it is a terrible nightmare I like to rework my way through it and figure it out. I actually really enjoy the process of breaking down a nightmare and trying to understand why it frightened me.

-Have you come to understand yourself better thanks to the habit of writing your dreams down?

Definitely, sometimes the dreams are so obvious to me and with pop psychology I can figure out why I feel that way and why they come up. There are certain themes that always come up and they are still silly things that I haven’t dealt with properly and in my day to day I don’t tend to think about, but at night it’s my brain trying to make sense of it and figure it out. I don’t really believe in dream dictionaries, each one has a different interpretation and I think the answers they give are a bit generic, and dreams aren’t that easy and are so personal to each person. I also never take my dreams as predictions of the future or important signs of anything – I’m not mental. I do have de-ja- vus all the time though. I mean, a huge percentage of people dreamt in black and white when television was in black in white, it just means they were influenced by what they saw. I don’t think mine are ever so random that they shock me. The dreams are full of my anxieties and likes as well as dislikes. I often dream about my old boarding school, which seems to mean I have a lot of unresolved issues there, but this is something I already know.

-Are there objects and people that you have dream about so much that they have turned into symbols? What are they? What do they mean?

There are objects that come up a lot and I know what they mean, when I dream about these things I always have to check myself and make sure I’m not getting overtired or stressed. There is a girl I went to school with and she made things difficult for me there, whenever I’m overstressed I dream that she’s back in my life and messing things up for me. I always dream about things at work going wrong when I’m under pressure. When I used to work on Harry Potter set driving the actors around on golf buggies, I would always dream I was crashing the really expensive golf buggies into walls or getting shouted at by directors (both things that happened). Now that I work as a model booker I constantly dream about the models. I also know that dreaming about small animals running all over my body and biting me is a control thing. I also dream about gaining weight and having weird teeth or having saggy boobs, these things are so personal and say so much about me but I choose to share them. Also dreaming about the house I grew up in Vauxhall is a big reoccurring dream for me, it comes up whenever I’m sad or worried. I’m back in that house and it is always dark and dimly lit because a lot of dark things happened in that house. My family always thought the house was haunted, because it attracted a lot of resentful and bad energy. The dreams there always leave me feeling confused and in them there is a ghost I can feel there with me.

-How was “Digestive Movement” born?

I’ve had these journals for so long and I had been thinking for a long time about what to do with them. The thing with dreams is they are not something people really want to listen to or find particularly interesting because they aren’t real life to a lot of people so its not important. Whenever I tell my dad a dream I’ve had about him, his eyes start to roll like he’s going unconscious, so I take the hint. I had to find a way to talk about my dreams without saying them out loud and illustrating is the best way as they are such a visual thing its better to illustrate them than to talk about them. I had done some illustrations on the computer, one was of this dream I had where the moon was a chocolate digestive biscuit being held up by the hand of god, and an alien spaceship in the shape of a dog flew alongside it, it all took place in Chinatown. I did the piece with computer and I thought it looked pretty cool, but it was not quick enough, it needed to be more urgent otherwise the dream could get lost, so I drew it by hand.  It got the name Digestive Movement because when I was about twelve, I was telling a friend of my mums who at the time was a colonic irrigationist about my dreams and she said that’s just overactive digestive movement. I felt kind of relieved that in a way that’s all it was.

-Which people close to you do you most tell your dreams to? Do they like them?

I usually tell them to my mum as she’s one of the few people that will listen, first she tells me her dreams which are usually about her and our old beloved family dog Julie (who died about three years ago). In the dreams Julie is usually flying through the air and then meets up with Jesus Christ or San Antonio (Saint Anthony), or she dreams about when her and my dad were staying in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay at the time of the terrorist attack. It was very traumatic for them and me and my sisters, so since that happened she relives from time to time and wakes up very scared. It’s not surprising it was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. So I tell her mine and she tells me hers. I don’t think anyone ever really likes or understands them in the same way as I do. I tell my sister Rachel as well as I dream about her a lot. The other day a friend I had grown a bit apart from sent me an email, telling me about a wonderful dream he had had, I thought that was so lovely, it was such a personal thing. I tell them to my boyfriend as well and he listens because he’s really sweet, we have a quick exchange, but he has really dull dreams about pushing refrigerators or talking to friends, we always laugh at how really really boring they are.

-Imagine your own dream theme park: Digestive Movement Park. Describe the main attractions, people, scenes.

Don’t get me excited! Digestive Movement the theme park would definitely be the worlds best theme park, the main ride which would be a massive water slide where you go down through a complicated intestine and there would be cinema screens on either side and moving dream dolls and sounds, and you would be fighting through objects from my dreams along with bits of undigested cheese and my dinner, the water would be coloured and have glitter in it, and you would have to go through the intestine in a swimming costume. It would be like the Its a small world ride in Disney World at a water park with singing dolls but in a massive colon full of cheese, it actually sounds pretty gross!

-Pick a word from your own dream dictionary and explain the consequences of dreaming about it.

Guinea pigs = Are a big reoccurring one. When I was little I had five guinea pigs, the first one was called Ginger and was murdered by being starved (not by my family) and then I had two Peruvian grey longhairs, a mother and a baby called Molly and Mandy and I thought that was really funny because my mother is called Mily, it wasn’t that funny. My mother used to wash their hair about three times a week. They always smelt really good. Then we got another one called Elvis and a friend of my family known as the guinea pig man who lived in a dirty flat in Vauxhall with fifty guinea pigs running around his feet gave us another one called Baby to keep Elvis company. I always dream about guinea pigs running all over my body or I can’t chase them. I had a really horrible dream where I was strangling them because they were biting me and trying to kill me. I was trying to break their necks, there was blood everywhere. I know that when I have no control over the guinea pigs it is because at that point I feel like I have no control over my life.

-Write your dream from 9/April/2010 here: 

Colin Farrell is planning to kill my sister Rachel and I. We are on a boat and are being smuggled away. We are now in a shop run by Chinese people that have a Moroccan mud hut round the back of the store that looks over a mountain and a green grassy field. As we continue walking through the mud hut we get to a tennis court that turns into a train station. I whisper to my sister ‘these men are doing drugs’, I tell her that ‘you can tell because you have to look closer, at the things around you. What looks like tarantulas on the mountain is actually if you look closer blood moving, and what looks like baby frogs sitting on top of the frogs on the floor, are actually hats on the frogs’. I am eating a huge bowl of ice cream and two very bossy Chinese women come in the room I am in and tell me to throw the rest away. I give my bowl to Nachi and say put the rest in the fridge, they throw glitter and washing up liquid on the ice cream.

SECOND PART

-Do you feel represented by your way to draw? Does it form a part of the way you value and appreciate your life? 

I do, I think the way I draw represents me and everything I’m about. I mean, I guess I draw like I am; loud, colourful, rude, naive and flawed. I think drawing gives me purpose, it’s my freedom and my outlet and I do it for myself, not for anyone else. I mean, you work all week and then when you come home you want to have something that’s your own and you just enjoy.

-How has changing your residence and being in Catalunya influenced your work? 

I think the main way in which I’ve changed is that being here has made me want to do things and value myself more. I was really insecure when I lived in London, I was so nervous about myself and apologetic. In London you step on someone’s toe and they beg you for forgiveness, that kind of over polite nervousness makes me shaky. I still really appreciate the British politeness but I also really appreciate honesty and I think there’s something a lot more honest about Spain, everyone’s a lot more direct. I feel like the people around me aren’t afraid to be themselves whether it’s good or bad, maybe it’s that or maybe I was just six years younger when I lived in London.

-Why are you attracted to images that reference childhood? 

I loved my childhood. I guess when I was a child I wanted to be all grown up and now I’m older I think of myself as a large child. I had a huge imagination that was sometimes too much but it has gotten less overwhelming and more stable and that’s probably why I love dreaming so much, because I get more and more of it back. I lose a little bit of my imagination as I get older and with dreaming I am channelling my inner kid.

-What aspects of your childhood have you kept in your adult life? 

Pretty much all of them. All the good bits at least; like having chocolate for breakfast or spending all my money on toys and booze, well I didn’t spend my money as a child on booze but I mean in the sense that I can do what I want, and not be told what to do or that I have to go to bed, or take a bath or that I’ve watched too much TV. Listening to my favourite music, cartoon theme tunes on my mp3 is something that is a huge luxury and I always dreamed of the day I would be able to do that. I haven’t changed very much since I was a little girl; I still wear the same clothes, high tops, leggings, bows and glitter. My flat is full of toys and things to play with like my bedroom was when I was little. Growing up is boring; you have to make it fun otherwise it’s all money, Ikea and bullshit. When you are a kid, you don’t think so much about what you are doing, you do something and it is right; it is usually your first instinct and that is best. When you get older you start questioning yourself and everything you do so much, it loses the spontaneity and a lot of the magic. I hope I’m not coming across like an untalented Michael Jackson, it’s just being a kid was more fun.

-Are your expectations of life as vivid and abundant as your dreams? 

Yes, I want my life to be interesting and colourful and fun. I want it to be full of funny stories, interesting characters and sex and animals (not together), and mysteries that need solving.

-Why do you give importance to porno, punk and amateur? 

I don’t give importance to being amateur; I just am amateur. I like naive works like Tahitian voodoo art, Indian art and Venezuelan art. I grew up around these kinds of works as my dad is basically Indian and my mum is Venezuelan. I see those influences in my drawings. As for porno it’s something that’s always been around me, that’s why I chose those two images for the logo on my website, because I am a mixture of innocence and sexual curiosity. In my work, I want to transmit that feeling of when you are a kid and you don’t know anything about anything but you are learning all these new things that are blowing your mind like seeing a sex scene on the telly, or reading your dad’s dirty magazine collection with a friend. I used to go up to the top room of my house in Vauxhall all the time and read this book my dad had called Sex in Cartoons. I remember thinking it was awesome and really stimulating, I mean cartoons were my life, I used to wake up in the mornings on a Saturday at about 4.00am and go downstairs and watch all of them. First were the Russian cartoons on channel 4, then the Australian cartoons, then all the mainstream ones, then the cable channels like Nickelodeon and then one out of my collection of vhs’ my dad had recorded for me, so to see a cartoon in this format of being all sexy and confusing was something I had never seen before and I never looked back.

-What is your answer in a party when people come up to you and ask what you draw? 

Someone will usually say something for me, and they’ll usually say ‘she draws transsexuals’. It depends, I’m not great at talking about my work on the spot and I don’t really bring it up, because I don’t know how. I prefer not to say too much and hear what people think.

-Your drawings are tender and phallic, comic and likeable. Are imperfection and humour, mirrors by which to reflect humanity?

Thank you, that’s such a nice thing to say. I don’t know if they are mirrors by which to reflect humanity, but I do think that if more people had more of a sense of humour the world would be a more pleasant place to be. A lack of sense of humour causes really extreme behaviour and that’s something that’s scary in this day and age. Imperfection and humour also tend to go well together.

-Are your drawings and your aesthetic preferences similar?

My drawings and aesthetic preferences are exactly the same. I love colourful things covered in glitter and are a bit funny.

-Would you like your drawings if you had not done them? 

I think I would, I think I would take them for what they are.

-It seems fundamental to you that your drawings are done with your hands, and that behind them an imperfect person. You don’t conform to one style and you enjoy mistreating proportions and perspective. Why do you grant yourself this freedom? 

I think I grant myself this freedom with everything, why strive for perfection if you are never going to achieve it? Without sounding like a total dick what’s a perfect painting or person anyway, and who gets to decide it. I used to be obsessed with being physically perfect and it drove me crazy, and I never achieved it and I don’t want that anymore. I’ve been drawing since forever and I’ve never got any better at it or figured it out, not to say I don’t try – I do and very hard and I do get better at perspectives but I feel like it’s not the most important thing, so much of getting it correct is still important to me but the perspective doesn’t seem to be. It’s more about getting something across. It’s like with my Spanish, I’ve been speaking Spanish forever, my mum is Venezuelan, my boyfriend is Spanish and I still make so many mistakes and say so many silly things and these mistakes make me and my boyfriend laugh. Maybe I’m just a bit slow, but I communicate well and people understand me and laugh with me, and maybe sometimes at me but I don’t care. I guess the same could be said for my drawings. I mean I learnt Spanish with my mum and it was never about grammar or technicalities, it was just about speaking to my Venezuelan cousins. The same with drawing, when I was little it was about doing something fun with my Granny and her getting to show them off later. She was never strict with me on dimensions and getting it right, it was always about being charming and expressing myself.

-Do you feel misunderstood by other artists? 

Not really by other artists in particular.

-Mention some of your favourite artists.

I have lots but that would take forever so I will name a couple. My dad has a lot of beautiful Indian paintings including a couple of Jamini Roy’s that were left to him by his father, I really love these paintings. I recently read Aline Crumb’s book ‘Need More Love’ and I fell in love with her, when I finished I sent her an email telling her how much I had loved her book, and told her I thought we had things in common because I like to draw, have a massive bum and a grumpy boyfriend. She wrote me back saying thank you with a sweet message. I thought that was so nice and it really cheered me up, she is so humble and lovely and real. I love Henry Darger and his amazing imagination and a friend of mine recently put me on to Alan Moore’s novels and I’m not sure how I let that slip by me for so long but it rocked my socks. I appreciate a lot of artists but I like them even better when they are my friends and they are lovely, like Martin Cole, Jose 3501, Manu Griñon, Mike Swaney, Enrique Doza and his projects at his gallery Tienda Derecha and MISCELANEA, comic book artist Sergi Puyol, Carlos Carbonell and his music group Internet2 and my other favourite music group ¡PELEA!

-What things of your character do you like to see reflected in others?

When I see too much of myself reflected in other people I usually find them really annoying, but I do like people to be good humoured, open minded and respectful of other people.

-Is there anything important that your parents have forgiven you or you to them?

I forgive my parents everything and anything, concrete events happen to everyone but I don’t want to talk about mine. My parents are really good to me and they are really special people and they do everything for me with good intentions and they are my best friends. My family is so important to me and a lot of things have happened but we always try and laugh it up and see the funny side.

-If you had to choose, you would prefer to have eyes or a mouth?

That is so tough, if I have eyes and no mouth, maybe I would see all these great things and not be able to talk about it, but then maybe I could draw all the time and just draw and write everything down, but to only have a mouth? Hmmm, in that case I could dream and talk about it. I think I would want the eyes, I would want to see and if I had no mouth I could become extremely beautiful and thin.

THIRD PART

-Have you ever in your “real life” used any of your dreams as currency?

No not so far, I would be very happy to dream for money and never wake up and have that be my job. I constantly dream I am being given big sums of money and wake up disappointed.

-You make reference to the real identity of the people that appear in your dreams. Do you want them to know? Is it a way of communicating with them with a wink?

Yeah, I do reference a lot of people by their full names. Most of these people from my past I am doubtful follow my web or know that I do this; so far no one has been in contact about it. I like to know when someone has dreamt about me especially if it was ages ago that I last saw them, so for me it’s my way of saying hey, I guess you’re still in there lurking around my brain.

-Are your dreams a contribution to your life? Do they influence your real life?
Yeah, when I have an amazing dream I think about it all the time, all through the day. I try and relieve the feelings they gave me, whether I died, or felt pain. Recently, I had a dream about my old family dog Julie and I felt like I could smell her hair and feel its soft curlyness on my fingers. When I woke up I was tearful; I missed her so much, it hurt. It may have been a dream but I still lived it, I felt things, I saw things, so yeah, in my life I’m just a normal boring person that doesn’t do anything particularly exciting but when I’m sleeping I just go wherever with no plans, no idea what’s going to happen for the next ten hours.

-Do you dream often with celebrities (singers, actors, artists)? What is your relationship with the people you most dream about?

I do dream about famous people quite a lot, the thing about that which is complicated for Digestive Movement is that some of the famous people I dream about I have met or have known at some point. Obviously, the majority I haven’t met, but having met or known them complicates the dream because it means the famous person is not totally random and it gives a different meaning to the dream. Colin Farrell seems to come up a lot, about six years ago I worked as a runner on Alexander the movie carrying around coffee cups in the desert. When I first got there I wasn’t very impressed by him, but his Irish charm seems to have seeped into my subconscious. Since I’ve been with my boyfriend he doesn’t come up much, I mean I don’t know him anymore. The reason I brought that up is there are certain celebrities I dream about who have more connection to my life than others, as with people that aren’t famous. Celebrities I don’t seem to have any connection with come up quite a lot and this always makes me change my mind about them for better or worse…and nothing will change your mind about someone like a sex dream, especially that really inappropriate dream I had about the King of Spain.

-When shown a dream, how do you choose the scene to illustrate?

Well, the dreams I tend to illustrate are mine, so I choose them based on different reasons, it will usually be the part of the dream that most stuck in my head when I woke up or is most visually interesting or symbolic.

-You have very good memory to remember your dreams and provide a lot of written details, which are very visual. Did you write stories or a journal before you started writing your dreams?

I used to keep a diary but they are so embarrassing most of them have been burnt or kept in secret hiding places, wherever I live. I used to try writing short stories but they were terrible too, I think I communicate better with drawings than with words.

-Do you know other people, artists, who have the habit of recording their dreams?

I don’t know any other people personally that write down their dreams but I’d recommend it.

-Do you share your dreams with people you want?

Digestive Movement is all about me sharing them without forcing them on people.

-What dream did you have where you’ve not wanted to wake up?

There are loads I’ve not wanted to wake up from. I usually set my alarm and snooze it for a couple of hours, every time the snooze goes I try and carry the dream from where it finished (lucidly). I had a dream recently where I was sitting on top of an extremely muscly black man who was lying down on the floor of a shopping mall. He was wearing gold spandex leggings and I sat on top of him, a circle of people stood around us watching. I woke up thinking: Why did that have to end? That was too exciting.

*

IN YOUR DREAMS:

-What has been the most deplorable physical state in which you have dreamed?

The other week I had a dream that Nachi had broken my heart. He was so cruel to me in the dream, I felt that my heart was empty and I felt totally abandoned and shocked because it was so out of the blue. In the morning, I felt breathless and was alone at work that day and I actually started crying. This sounds like the confessions of a nutter, I mean I already knew that Nachi is very important to me, but I felt like I had lost him, I can tell the difference between dreams and reality, I knew it hadn’t happened but it was one of the most horrible dreams I’ve ever had.

-What is the age you most regularly appear as?

I’m not even sure who I am in my dreams; one second I’m me and the next second I’m a young Chinese boy, so I don’t usually know how old I am.

-What is the most terrifying time you have died?

I die all the time but for me worse than dying are dreams of my life having been ruined. The other week I dreamt I murdered someone. I was accused of murdering Julia Babbage who was my best friend as a child. I was told I was going to go to jail. I stole a scrapbook from a frightening bald man’s bedroom. He was Julia’s husband so I got the book and run down to a crowd of people in a square. My parents and I were sleeping in the street being protected by people, I saw Jay (a friend I used to know) then I saw Julia; she is dead. I asked her to tell me who murdered her, I was crying, I told her that we grew up together and we have a past, we were like family, she was crying, she hinted it was her husband’s brother. I saw two men in a car driving past; they are looking for the book and me, I saw my mum, she is at an ice cream shop. As the dream was happened I had a feeling my life was over.

-What powers do you have?

I don’t usually have any reoccurring powers in my dream, but I do have the power to lucid dream, which is quite useful.

-What are your fears?

The worst ones are that something happens to my family. Recently, I was sleeping and I woke up abruptly screaming and flailing my arms and legs; I was hysterical. Nachi was trying to wake me and was wondering what was wrong with me. I had seen the open mouth of an octopus and he had a lot of teeth.

© All illustrations by Jessica Boston.