Due to their strategically active cerebral nature, dreams should ultimately have a place in the Parliament of Others.

Last night I dreamt I was walking through a vast exhibition in an important, yet unnamed, museum, enveloped in a haze of images. Three or four rooms displayed conceptual works. I was there at the pre-opening, surrounded by other artists, journalists, critics, museum directors, gallery directors, and most Portuguese art collectors. The customary smiles, hugs and kisses mingled with knowing smiles and looks of surprise, most of them directed at me. This slightly irritating deference was because I was represented in the exhibition, as the person who had arranged the surprise explained, with several works from the 1980s, among a majority of works by other authors from the 1990s and the first two decades of this century.

As the works were shown to me, I felt a strange sensation: I did not recognise them as mine, except for a black-and-white postcard of a long-lost video entitled “Patrícia, twelve days”, 1980. I really could not remember those works as being mine. The next day, I attended a guided tour of the exhibition. One of the curators led the way. It was then that I realised that all the works displayed in that sort of conceptual section of the exhibition were, in fact, recent works by younger artists whom I either did not know or barely knew—except for one long-time friend. My postcard was placed among this friend’s works, which were generally large in scale. So I am clearly not suffering from Alzheimer’s!

This exhibition of conceptual or post-conceptual works—as those produced after the 1970s are generally called—entirely monochromatic, could hardly have made a deeper impression on my subconscious. That is why I woke up and was able to fix this dream in memory. The advantage of dreams is, in fact, this: they have no colour. Works of art, architecture, and audiences—everything vaguely in black and white, or without any colour at all.

In other words, we almost always dream in black and white. Only once did a bloody, living ball of flesh shoot out from under my bed. I believe this is because in the subconscious—especially in dreams—there is no perception but only memories of perception: the memory of colour, but not colour itself, which can only be felt in person, through the eyes in dialogue with the neurons. We can describe qualia, but to be precise, we need to show what we want to describe.

We can assign codes to colours—almost as many as there are colours reaching our eyes—and thus know exactly which shade of lipstick perfectly suits our lover’s taste. Without these numbers, however, it is practically impossible to be sure, when faced with a Lancôme display, which lipstick the woman we love is wearing. Perhaps through a similar mechanism, neurons nonetheless manage to memorise colours; yet, just as they rarely fire chromatic sensations in dreams, the same happens in thought. I can think of red, but I neither see nor feel red as a result of its inner verbal utterance.

But if this is so—if we invariably dream without chromatic sensations—why do dreams have such importance in artistic creation? A plausible hypothesis is that their power is inherently conceptual.

Coloured dreams are, therefore, pastiches.

Given their strategically active cerebral nature, dreams surely deserve a seat in the Parliament of Others.