C. M. Franke | Photography

W hether you saw the movie Inception and loved it, or hated it, (I loved it) you have to admit - they made the dream sequences very interesting. Maybe not as stylized and bizarre as they could have been, but that might have distracted from the story line at hand. Personally, I loved the moment when the Cobb character explains to Ariadne:  "...D reams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that  something was actually strange. " It always struck me how true that is: The things we see and take as perfectly normal in a dream, are really outlandish when we see them through the filter of our waking normality. A person walking down a street transforms into a scurrying mouse on the curb, which soon becomes an eagle lifting off to become a small airplane ascending into the sky. As it begins to then transmute into a huge jet airliner, somehow, through all of that, we understand - we just "know" - that the person we

" Use the bricks of the ruins to build a new castle. " -- Unknown I remember having heard this many years ago. Using bricks from an old ruin to build a new castle. I understood the idea that was being put forth. I've even encouraged any number of people over the course of time to 'dust off and move ahead' using the same allegory. Sort of a more eloquent way of saying "If life hands you lemons..."  Only now do I somewhat understand how it applies to art, and photography. It is incredibly easy to have an idea in your head that you cannot seem to shake. No matter how many times you try to make it work and fail to get it right. No matter how many times you do it over and over and still walk away unsatisfied - that idea remains like an ever-clanging bell somewhere in the distance. Just when you thought you have left it to the past, it comes back, wanting to be heard. Here - I have learned - is the key: Perhaps it was not the idea that was weak, but