Thank you, Janie.

Amos, everyone really is an artist, and by extension a poet and a musician. Whether we have the tools, or know how to use the tools, or are even given the opportunity to have or use the tools which are necessary to show other people our art, or poetry or music is another thing entirely.

I was lucky enough to be given carte blanche in organizing a visual art program for preschool children, a program I ran for five uninterrupted years. Now children learn initial drawing skills through the ordinary process of physical and neural development. They begin with random marks; progress as large motor skills improve to long curved up and down from-the-shoulder scribbled lines; then with more fine motor skills draw in addition from the wrist, making circular scribblings.

Every child does this. And one day, in a random tangle of circular markings, the child sees an image every child has impressed on their brain from birth: a face. I've witnessed this eureka moment hundreds of times. It is a young child's great discovery, and they may spend days or weeks just drawing single awkward circles, and if you ask them what it is, those most articulate will identify it as 'mommy'.

The following development is just as predictable, and just as wonderful. They put marks on the face, indicating features. Soon, they add multiple lines off the edge of the circle, indicating limbs, hair, ears. This is the moment in which some adult or older child comes along and says "Oh, you've drawn the sun!" The child hasn't, of course, even thought about the sun - s/he's still trying to draw an important human being. And here is the beginning of art: the child does not stop trying to draw a human figure; soon s/he will be adding a closed object=torso, differentiating legs from arms, refining features and indicating hair. But the idea implanted from without, that the sun can be represented by a drawing of a round face with external marks, which in no way resembles the real sun, barring generic round-ness, is the beginning of understanding the concepts of representational art, and of symbols.

That sun will persist in childrens' art for years, even many adults with little formal or self-directed training will include it if asked to draw a picture.

Whether the sun-drawing child grows up to be a visual artist largely depends on subsequent events. Do their paintings land on the fridge or in the recycle box, are they handed colouring books whose drawings are ego-flatteningly 'better' than their own, are they encouraged by the presence of materials and the praise of others, are they given the opportunity to learn techniques, do they find they love physical games, or music, or reading better than drawing and painting? It's a fact that virtually anyone who wants to can be taught to draw.

My experience leads me to believe that it is within the potential of every human to be an artist or a poet; all of us have within our minds an enormous assemblage of personal and shared symbolic images and connections. In our recollections of our dreams, we realise a little of that potential, become representational artists and evocative poets. We interpret our 'art' as we have learned to, as the child has learned to see the sun along with its mother's face.

I think remembered dreams can be marvellous, powerful, evocative demonstrations of our natural human ability to use symbols to describe self-chosen reality. A Tarot of the brain, informed by self-knowledge and decorated beautifully by the artist within.