The delicate ecosystem of Duffrey Stonkett
by Steve Xoh

I became a student recently, beginning a three-year MA in Art Psychotherapy at Roehampton University. It’s something I have been wanting to do for almost 20 years, but finally the time felt right, so I applied and was delighted to be accepted. The course is grounded in Jungian psychology, a school of psychology that I am only a little familiar with. There is a lot about Jung’s work that lends itself brilliantly to exploring creativity and the realms of the imagination, but the thing that really grabbed my attention was Jung’s interest in developing an exploratory relationship with our dreams.

Whilst I love the idea of exploring my dreams, the trouble I have is that I very rarely remember them. Often, I will wake in the night and be too tired to write down a dream, convincing myself that of course I will remember it in the morning, only to find that I have no recollection of it at all. The dreams I do remember, though, always blow my mind, especially the ones that are bizarre or surreal. Many years back, I remember a dream where I invented a board game that became a hit. In the dream, a guy I used to work with called Andrew loved it so much that he couldn’t stop playing it. I managed to write down that dream in the middle of the night and, on reading my notes in the morning, burst out laughing on learning that the game was called Duffrey Stonkett.

Reading about Jung’s practice of “active imagination” got me wondering if there was a way I could build a bridge between the weird world of my dreams and my waking consciousness. Could I start a process of becoming a dream farmer in which I could harvest bizarre concepts like Duffrey Stonkett and bring them more regularly into my work? The major challenge to this idea was finding a better way of remembering my dreams, so I decided to use a sleep talk app to help do this. Whilst these apps are designed to record sleeping sounds, I realised that they would provide me with an easy way of describing my dreams without having to fully wake up and write them down. The “harvesting” part of my dream farming would take place the next morning when I listened back to the recording.

I was excited by this idea, but my first experiences were simultaneously hilarious and frustrating. On listening back to the recordings, I could barely work out what I was talking about, not only because what I was saying made little sense, but also because my speech was so quiet and mumbled. I realised that I needed to make a conscious effort to speak louder and more clearly, even if it meant waking up a bit more. The process of listening to these clearer recordings was even more bizarre. Like some kind of somnambulistic séance where I was channelling a me from a parallel universe. I would wake knowing that I had recorded something, but it was always a huge surprise listening back to it, like a surreal and slightly disturbing version of Jackanory. Being reminded of certain images or symbols from the dream seemed to reconnect me with the feelings and sensations I was experiencing whilst I was asleep, and I would suddenly have an embodied experience of the entire dream coming back to me.

I decided that I needed to somehow build a bridge between these worlds in order to better farm my dreams for weird ideas or concepts. So I came up with an experiment. After I’d described my dream, I would set myself a simple task that wouldn’t involve me waking up too much but would hopefully tap into this strange state of in-betweenness and harvest some thoughts from it. I started to experiment by asking myself to come up with an invention inspired by the dream. However, on listening back to the recordings, I found sleepy me simply saying “I can’t be bothered to come up with an invention” so I realised I needed something simpler.

I love coming up with weird band names and have published collections of them as fake festival poster art prints (Spongest 2018 and Gnopstefapalooza 2019), so I thought that would be a less taxing task to set myself. I imagined the dream-adjacent band names I would come up with being of the quality of Duffrey Stonkett, but on listening back to them the next morning, I realised they were pretty shit and sounded like mediocre pub cover bands (Tidal Terror, Privacy Breach, The Pain Mongers and Overpowering Meat to name but a few).

After a week of weird dreams but disappointing experiments, I concluded that it simply wasn’t possible for me to build a bridge from the waking world to the sleeping world in this way. So I returned to Jung for inspiration, reading more about his practice of active imagination, which offers a structured way of exploring dream imagery whilst awake. This involves bringing an image or character from a dream into your imagination and allowing it to develop spontaneously, rather than consciously directing what happens. You then actively engage with whatever emerges, perhaps through dialogue, questioning or even disagreement, to explore what it might reveal about your inner world.

I decided I would try this process on the next dream that I recorded, but then I had one that totally reframed this whole thing and made me question whether I actually wanted to interact with the dream world in this way. The dream, transcribed verbatim from the recording, was as follows:

“Whoever I was interacting with, basically I discovered, from exploring this language, the people were saying that it wasn’t actually a language - it was just stuff held together from a goalkeeper’s perspective, a goalkeepers point of view and that resulted in you wearing typically a green sweatshirt or jumper. That was just indicative of it. There’s more but i’m getting sleepy again.”

I experienced a weird mix of responses as I listened back to this mumbled recording. I was smiling, utterly confused, wide-eyed, laughing and feeling like I was experiencing a recording of some kind of sacred madness. I had no recollection of recording this one at all, and it seemed that I had somehow recorded it right on the knife-edge between sleep and consciousness. It had a beautiful, surreal and intimate quality to it - like a very ornate but terribly delicate object that would shatter should it exist in the material world. It felt like I had finally discovered the location of a mysterious remote island, never visited by humans and containing its own undisturbed ecosystem of strange plants, creatures and landscapes. And, just as I would on discovering such an uncontaminated island in the real world, I realised how beautifully fragile it was and decided I didn’t want to explore it or farm it, but to simply leave it be.

Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean was once an extraordinary ecosystem of seals, penguins, seabirds and unusual subantarctic vegetation until human beings discovered it in the early nineteenth century. People began to settle on the island and introduced cats, rabbits and mice (sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally). This had a huge effect on the delicate ecosystem and, to try and redress the balance, conservationists eliminated the island’s feral cats. But whilst this intervention helped protect the native birds, it also contributed to a huge increase in the rabbit population, which went on to devastate large areas of vegetation.

The island of Surtsey, which lies off the southern coast of Iceland, has a different story. Despite being of significant geological and biological interest to humans (the island emerged following an underwater volcanic eruption), the Icelandic government decided that Surtsey would be legally protected from human visitors, with only a small number of authorised scientists permitted to observe the ecosystem under strict conditions.

So the unexpected conclusion of my experiments is that I want my dreamland to remain more Surtsey than Macquarie. To leave it utterly undisturbed and flourishing in its own weird and beautiful way. To not try to bring back souvenirs or contaminate it by introducing things from the waking world. To simply know that, by design, I don’t need to know what goes on there, but just trust that it is doing important work in maintaining the balance of my own internal ecosystem. And whilst I will carry on recording my dreams in my sometimes incomprehensible, half-asleep state, I will simply regard these as postcards from a parallel me rather than an attempt to conquer or colonise myself.