Shana Nys Dambrot

Zen Psychosis Shana Nys Dambrot

[Zen Psychosis] is a work of experimental fiction: the attempt to construct a personal memoir culled not from diaries, but dreams. In a way, as the scenes are taken from my own journals, this book is not fiction at all; the dreams are real, their meanings form a story. As a critic of art and an amateur student of Jungian psychoanalysis, I am often compelled to decode intuitive, inscrutable symbols and assemble meaning from the clues the dream or the artist leaves behind. In this novel, I'm applying the technique to my own inner self.

This was directly inspired by Henry Miller, who in 1923 slipped an account of a vivid dream into a collection of short stories in [Black Spring]. "Into the Nightlife: A Coney Island of the Mind" later became an illustrated book in a collaboration between Miller and the artist Bezalel Schatz in 1947, as its tantalizing surrealism and literary voice actively blurred the boundaries between experience and imagination.

The accompaniment of fantastical pinhole photographs by Osceola Refetoff augments and expands on this dynamic; bringing a beguiling dreamlike quality to what are in fact, people and places in the real world outside ourselves. As an artist and student of cinema, Refetoff has long been fascinated with the conventional visual language of what dreams are supposed to look like.