In the Dream

In the Dream occupies the threshold between waking perception and the dissolved logic of sleep, a territory that Hasegawa's abstract woodblock language is well suited to inhabit. The print likely employs soft-edged forms achieved through deliberate misregistration or the exploitation of ink bleed on [washi](/glossary/washi), creating passages that hover between legibility and dissolution. Dream imagery in Japanese visual culture carries specific cosmological associations — the dream as a site where the barrier between the living and the ancestral realm becomes permeable. Hasegawa's Zen practice would inflect this with the understanding that the boundary between dreaming and waking is itself a construction, and that the floating, unmoored quality of dream experience points toward a more fundamental reality. The abstract treatment prevents the print from being read as illustration of a specific dream, preserving its quality of open, subjective invitation.