From the author: About working with fear We carry our own horror stories within ourselves. Something creepy, latently exciting, but not yet even formed into a thought. However, it interferes with life, instills strange anxiety, and deprives one of vital energy. What to do with all this? Try to express it. Bring it into the light of day. Look, from there, like from an old carpet, moths and a lot of dust will fly out, the extracted thing will seem quite ridiculous and even a little funny - in broad daylight. An example can be taken from Salvador Dali himself. And for this you don’t have to be the same owner of remarkable imagination and a virtuoso draftsman like this great surrealist. Dali was his own psychotherapist; he redrew horror stories. For example, the famous "Caprichos" by Francisco Goya. Despite Dali's extraordinary popularity in Russia, his series of lithographs on the theme of Goya remains little known. “The dreams of the mind give birth to monsters” is the title of one of Goya’s etchings from this series. Creepy pictures that chilled the blood for two centuries. But what did Dali do with them? He actually turned them into children's coloring books! I transferred them to my lithographs, filled them with color and added my own details. For example, thanks to Dali, an erotic trunk grows behind the backs of two lovers. Or a gloomy scene of drunken monks in a surreal interpretation is filled with moonlight, and a naked woman appears in the background... However, Dali practiced such jokes not only with Goya. As the French psychoanalyst Anne Anseline Schutzenberger writes, he rewrote Millet’s famous painting “Evening Bells” sixty-four (!) times (where a peasant and his wife with their heads bowed, hands joined, pray in a wheat field over a basket of potatoes). For what? He probably didn’t really understand why then. But when researchers later x-rayed this painting by Millet, they discovered the coffin of a small child under a basket of potatoes. Upon learning of the discovery, Dali said: “I always sensed death in this painting.” Having rewritten it 64 times, the artist got rid of his craving for death, which was strong in him, since his older brother, also named Salvador, died before his birth and the artist was haunted by an obsession to repeat his fate. “I lived death before I lived life. My brother died three months before I was born. My mother was shocked to the core by this. And in my mother’s womb I already felt the anguish of my parents. My fetus was washed by a hellish placenta. I felt it deeply an imposed presence, as if I had been deprived of love. This dead brother, whose ghost greeted me, was named Salvador - like my father and I, and this is no coincidence... I learned to live by filling the vacuum of love that was not really intended for me." . So, you can follow Dali’s example and get rid of your hidden fear, even if its name has not yet been named. 1. BE A GOYA. To do this, you need to draw your horror on a white sheet of paper. Perhaps by drawing this fear, you will understand what exactly it is about. And this will be a very important awareness. Probably, such awareness will not happen, but the picture will evoke certain associations. Do not brush aside any memories and feelings that will arise at that moment - they are all important and deserve your attention. 2. DALI'S ART When the work is finished, add details to it that would make this drawing funny. Paint “your Goya” without sparing your imagination. And without regretting anything at all. Any ideas can be used. And then name your new creation.