Stacy Tenhouten

Bone Tea

2020

I had a dream about my mother that left me feeling in turmoil over the meaning of our relationship with one another. In my emotion, I assumed that the dream served to validate feelings that I had carried all my life with respect to how my mother felt about me. The turmoil did not disappear as I sat with this dream, which, to me, meant that the dream represented something far deeper than a validation of feelings. In order to be in a relationship with my dream through a less reactive lens, I knew I had to get the dream outside of me. I decided to make an audio recording of the dream and listen to it as a story. In listening to the dream, images began to stand out to me that I had not paid attention to before. I began to draw and sculpt these images. I used active imagination and began photo- graphing scenarios with the images. New feelings came up and I acted out these feelings in a short film. It was after making this film that a deeper meaning to the dream was revealed. A liberation happened and an explosion of creativity and production transpired.