Patagonia catalogue photos are “a real mythological treasure,” designed to fan the well-to-do (white male) trekker’s desire: to possess fantastic landscapes in solitude, to conquer extreme environments while cocooned in comfort.

At bottom, the sleeping cragsman snuggles into bedrock in Torres del Paine in Patagonia, a glacier-carved river valley beneath iconic granite peaks. The image merges him with the setting, as if he were part of the planet’s upper crust.  In his dream, he is ascending to even higher strata, gaining lithic face in a process of character formation by rock formation: the climber bonded to stone through strength, endurance, and balance.

In a moment of vertical vertigo, the climber daydreams of getting horizontal, being back in his sleeping bag before the day began.  In this second sleeper’s dream, he becomes a geologist, as drawn by Jean Dubuffet.  Equipped with a magnifying glass and cane, he inspects the ground for specimens, just as the climber searches the rock face for handholds.  Dubuffet turns the horizontal surface of the earth on its edge so it is more akin to the verticality of the rock face, expressing the geologist’s oneness with the earth by flattening them in the same plane and drawing his body and the earth’s surface with the same energetic lines.

The geologist dreams of being a stone surrounded by siblings in a nest of ovoid rocks, unconsciously reprising the medieval image of stones as lithic eggs that hold a slumbering life inside.  The rocks dream of their brute matter transmuting into air: the eggs become bubbles in turbulent water flow. The earth abides: matrix of all dreams, it registers these plate tectonics of the mind, and indifferently incorporates human corporeality into its corpus.