Art & Healing Related Articles

Is Lucid Dreaming Dangerous?

Feeling a vague discomfort about the safety of lucid dreaming?  Is it dangerous: a slippery slope into madness? Will it make you lose touch with reality?  You’re not alone in these thoughts, although I say with confidence that there’s nothing to fear. Not even fear itself.

This essay is part one of three addressing the central arguments used against the practice of lucid dreaming. Today, I’ll address lucid dreaming and mental illness, a connection that is being made more frequently than ever as lucid dreaming becomes a household word.

There’s no evidence that lucid dreaming can bring on mental illness. In fact, lucid dreaming has recently been linked to resilience, the ability to maintain stability during and after traumatic events. Lucid dreaming is used clinically to help cope with nightmares, and is considered by many psychologists to promote psychological growth and encourage problem solving.

So why does the myth continue to rear its head? We can thank bad journalism, for one, such as Time magazine’s regrettably unbalanced and fear-mongering piece on murder suspect Jared Loughner last fall.

But the myth goes deeper, and seems to be based on common fears of lucid dreamers, as well as some logical fallacies and headline-grabbing metaphors used by dream psychologists.

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Abused children turn their fears into artwork for groundbreaking exhibition

Gently folding back the torn edges of the child's T-shirt so that the ripped and bloody heart can be seen more easily, Chris Yianni frowns down at his toddler-sized, papier-mache artwork. "Imagine the damage a drunken man could do to this model if he really let fly," he says. "There wouldn't be much left of it, would there? My dad used to attack me when I was this size." Yianni's mannequin is just one of the 1,000 paintings, soundscapes and sculptures by children and young adults to be showcased at the Royal Academy's groundbreaking new exhibition

MIXED MEDIA & PAINTING TECHNIQUES
04 June 12

Before I start, just bear in mind the general rule that oil based paints & solvents etc. can be applied over water based ones – but not the other way around. Let's start with some textural examples - either acylic or oil is suitable and these are applied with a painting knife. A painting knife has a raised handle as opposed to a palette knife which is flat. There are 3 main ways to use a painting knife – loading the paint on the side of the blade for thin lines, on the flat for broad areas or the tip for smaller controlled areas. (If your acrylic is too fluid, you can add some modelling paste to it for body). A good way to learn is to use any leftover paint at any time to practise with. A light touch is needed usually and if you are layering one colour over another for broken effects, you need to be so light that you can think of not so much "putting the paint on"as "leaving it behind".

How to Draw for Oil Paintings
04 June 12

A complex drawing is quickly lost when the oil colors go on, so simple shapes and contour lines make the best drawings for oil paintings. The drawing may be made directly on the canvas or it can be prepared before and transferred to the canvas. When drawing directly on the canvas, PAINT that has been thinned with thinner is the best. Because it is paint, it doesn't need to be isolated from subsequent colors. CHARCOAL can be used for drawing on the canvas. The charcoal drawing must be isolated from the paint layers with FIXATIVE. Vine charcoal is easier to seal with fixative than compressed charcoal.