Many of my dreams from this period had a recurring theme: I came across a child that had been beaten then abandoned. But this dream was unique, insofar as it lacked plot and characters, merely presenting me with an extraordinary vision.
I dreamt that I saw a painting. It was in the Gothic style, and depicted Christ standing before the altar with his hands raised and turned outwards in a curious manner. Although he stood before the altar, performing the mass, there was also a sense that this was the resurrection. Christ stood within the tomb, and dawn was breaking behind him. His stance, the gestures – all were reminiscent of Gothic paintings that depict Christ rising from the tomb.
But in this composition, he wore a long robe with a cowl, like that of a monk. And indeed, there was a monastary behind him, reminiscent of the Byzantine monastaries I’d last seen in Moldavia and Kiev, with their peculiar onion domes. The entire atmostphere of the painting was pervaded by a curious blue glow.
Yet, strangest of all, there was a chalice on the altar – a chalice that was topped with a glass vessel, like the vas hermeticum of alchemy. And within this vas-like chalice, a child was being born in a cloud of luminous vapours. This was both a child and a ‘little man’ such as one sees in alchemical images of the homunculus or Byzantine renderings of the Christ-child. And finally, at the top of the painting, I noticed the words ‘ALCHEMIST CHRIST’. The painting had a strong feeling of transformation, transfiguration, and transsubstantiation.
Although I had no idea what it meant, I immediately set about drawing this image onto a prepared wooden panel. From the alchemical arrangement of images given to me in the dream, I started drawing more and more, freely associating as I went along.
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