“A family of giant bats and talking owls watching over you as you sleep are far better than the monsters that live inside of your mind.”
Finding Monsters
I would spend entire days at the public library as a child. It was a hiding place, a safe haven, and a wonderland to stimulate my imagination so what awaited me outside of there would not find me.
Before books became digital, the library was my favorite place in the world. It was like a Demarcation Zone in that you had two hemispheres – the children’s section and the grown-up literature.
I proverbially crawled through the barbed wire and landmines of archaic history books and periodicals to find myself in the largest aisle. A giant wall of oversized books in brilliant colors. The section was the Art aisle and my gateway drug to finding my first love.
The overwhelming experience of walking through what seemed like an endless environment of books was awe-inspiring. What is hidden beneath these pages and the hours ahead revealed images and words, my young mind could never have imagined.
One book, in particular, held onto my curiosity and never left. Los Caprichos was an oversized book. I remember asking for help to remove it from a top shelf.
A dusty faded black cover with gold lettering along the spine with bats embossed into it. That’s what caught my eye – the bats.
Boys like bats.
It’s in our blood.
I sat on the floor for what seemed like hours and page after giant page I was entranced by the imagery.
Detailed etching that I thought were simply drawings at the time containing beautiful, odd, and horrifying imagery.
I was never the same.
Bats, Death, and More Monsters
Los Caprichos, or the Caprices, is a work of eighty etchings by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya dating back to the late 1700s. Although this book was far too graphic for my young eyes, there was something truthful about it.
There was a two-fold meaning within the imagery.
First, it appealed to the artistic side of my brain that was just beginning to develop and my imagination absorbed every line and story.
Secondly, the book called upon imagery I did not quite understand and made me both uncomfortable and excited.
Los Caprichos contains a variety of subjects such as clergy members, witches, anthropomorphic animals, and visuals of the very worst things humans can do to each other.
This hit me hard.
The discomfort I felt from the imagery called upon a similar feeling I would have inside my body during those moments of abuse I had begun to experience at this young age.
All the questions as to why adults I thought were trustworthy would engage in such horrifying ways to my young mind seemed to make, for lack of a better term, logical sense.
“They were monsters too”, I thought. “and this could be my fate!” as I looked upon the horrors of war and violence the pages produced.
I thought all things made sense now because all uncomfortable things are caused by giant flying bats, witches, and monsters. Surely they were all around me every day.
The Sleep of Reason
In part, I created the Think and Destroy platform as a grown man who has only recently been healthy enough to do a deep dive into my childhood abuse. How we grow to examine what monsters are in the real world to how we can become the monsters that harm us has been an extensive part of the process.
I feel that sometimes we need to reach back into the darkness to better understand the traumas that found us and look them in the monstrous eye.
One image in particular painted this feeling for me back then as a child. The artwork in that book titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters opened a doorway into every difficult emotion and moment that would last my entire life.
As Goya created this work, he had written that he had in mind that although the Caprichos were a dark visual exposure of the Spanish government and classes of people at that time, it was something more.
Goya had expressed he had been manic-depressive since childhood. Trauma, fear, and horror had lived inside him long before the traumas of Spain during this time.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is a visceral image I have had near me in some capacity most of my life. It contains an image of a man, perceived to be Goya himself, slumped over his desk while the nocturnal animals surround him.
The portrayal of how the monsters can find us and devour us even as we are exhausted and weak – even as we sleep at our most vulnerable.
“The monsters are part of us and those things which harm us, particularly our shame, our fear, and negative thoughts.”
Giant owls have come to guard us or take us away into the darkness we run from. We cannot know which. Reasoning won’t allow it.
Monstrous bats beat their wings through the air with open mouths and we do not know how quickly we will be taken and left in the darkest recesses of our minds.
As an anthropomorphic cat sits paralyzed and bewildered by all that surrounds us and it will all come for us, eventually, when we are most vulnerable.
Fear, Shame, and Wonder
I knew then that every thought was a monster. The Caprichos, the whims that come from out of nowhere are out there waiting and within us waiting as well. Fear, shame, disappointment, and wonder somehow all live here together.
What I am getting at is that once upon a time, long before my cognitive development would allow, I started to piece together what trauma meant. I could put imagery with emotion and create something that made sense to my young mind. Imagination and the terror within it would adopt a truth that would follow me for years to come.
In the decades since, I have not had one year go by without looking at The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. They were not necessarily monsters after all, but a little part of me in each of them.
Francisco Goya could not have known that nearly 200 years after completing these artworks, a young boy would find them in a library at a pivotal time in his young life.
Today, when I feel the “monsters” enter the room, I greet them. I am not a little boy anymore and I understand what it means to be a monster as well. They are not there to fend off so I may finally find sleep.
No, they are there to listen as I tell my tales of what I have found in my reasoning. I have survived many nightmares, I would tell them. I have seen you many times and yet you return with amnesia.
That’s okay.
The monsters have come to enjoy themselves. Some days they may appear as a faint memory we can’t quite decipher and other times, they appear as parental guardians or our dearest friends.
I don’t know if the tragedies of war and all the people of Spain went through while de Goya was alive can compare to the tragedies and traumas so many of us have experienced, but somehow I believe that for me, a person of Galician heritage, those generational traumas found their way to me.
I also like to believe that those monstrous bats and giant owls and other creatures are part of my family.
A family of giant bats and talking owls watching over you as you sleep are far better than the monsters that live inside of your mind.
Imagination and Reasoning
A practice in utilizing visualization with trauma and emotional response can be found in imagining an Imagination and Reasoning Pyramid.
Take a moment where the emotion surface. Take the visual image or imagine an image that triggers something you may not quite understand. By following the levels of connecting with that imagery from bottom to top of the pyramid, you may find a doorway into understanding where these responses come from and why. Perhaps you may be able to just let it find you in your sleep as Goya had except it becomes part of the story that feeds you not haunts you.
This process involves:
• Interpreting the visual and how it may connect to a trauma or other past experience.
• Recall what emotions are connected with this memory or feeling and sit with them.
• Look for what meaning the visual and emotional response offer you to understand this feeling deeper.
• Transfer that meaning into your subconscious (and unconscious) as you rest and asking for a deeper understanding and strength to how you are responding so you may see this as a growth response.
• FInally, there is sleep and reason to found as you rest and wake. Take this information with you into actions like journaling, or your morning exercise, or commute to work, and what discoveries have formed to help clarify traumas and hidden emotions.
Sleep and Trauma
Goya could evoke terror because he understood what terror truly looks like and how it attaches itself to our psyche. So as I look at this artwork now, I see the artist asleep at his desk as the creatures of darkness arrive to deliver the unknown.
I also like to believe that as he dreams of enlightenment in a time without reason, that evil can be extinguished in the mind a little boy will one day grow up to tame the very things that taunted him as he slept.
Imagination and reason have prevailed, Senior Goya.
