"As soon as I became old enough to make my dreams my reality, I became a firm believer that the subconscious and the world outside of our flesh and blood is essentially the truth"
About this Quote
Melissa Auf der Maur speaks like an artist who discovered that agency turns imagination into evidence. Growing from a dreamer into a maker, she suggests that once you can translate vision into action, the unseen realms of the subconscious and spirit stop being mere fantasies and start functioning as reliable truths. For a musician and visual artist who came of age in the 1990s alternative rock scene, that revelation fits a life spent mining intuition, myth, and atmosphere to create work that resonates beyond the literal.
The line splits reality into two layers: flesh-and-blood life with its visible constraints, and the inner and outer invisibles that shape meaning. She places more faith in the latter. That is not a rejection of the body so much as a reordering of authority. The measurable world delivers facts; the subconscious offers coherence, direction, and a felt sense of authenticity. Making dreams real is the crucible where that belief is tested. If an image from sleep, an impulse, or a symbol can be manifested into a song, a performance, or a multimedia project that moves people, then the dream was not a mirage but a signal.
Auf der Maur’s career supports this intuition. From playing bass in Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins to building solo albums that expand into films and visual narratives, she treats art as a portal into archetypal space. That approach echoes Jungian ideas and the old avant-garde wager of Surrealism: the psyche contains truths that the rational daylight cannot fully articulate. Experience on stage likely sharpened this conviction. In the feedback loop between performer and audience, there is a shared field that feels more real than the individual body, an energy that validates the unseen.
Her statement is also about adulthood. Being old enough means owning the power and responsibility to align life with inner vision. Once that alignment happens, the subconscious ceases to be a private dreamworld and becomes a compass, pointing to what is essentially true.
The line splits reality into two layers: flesh-and-blood life with its visible constraints, and the inner and outer invisibles that shape meaning. She places more faith in the latter. That is not a rejection of the body so much as a reordering of authority. The measurable world delivers facts; the subconscious offers coherence, direction, and a felt sense of authenticity. Making dreams real is the crucible where that belief is tested. If an image from sleep, an impulse, or a symbol can be manifested into a song, a performance, or a multimedia project that moves people, then the dream was not a mirage but a signal.
Auf der Maur’s career supports this intuition. From playing bass in Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins to building solo albums that expand into films and visual narratives, she treats art as a portal into archetypal space. That approach echoes Jungian ideas and the old avant-garde wager of Surrealism: the psyche contains truths that the rational daylight cannot fully articulate. Experience on stage likely sharpened this conviction. In the feedback loop between performer and audience, there is a shared field that feels more real than the individual body, an energy that validates the unseen.
Her statement is also about adulthood. Being old enough means owning the power and responsibility to align life with inner vision. Once that alignment happens, the subconscious ceases to be a private dreamworld and becomes a compass, pointing to what is essentially true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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