Forest Bess

Bess turned his attention to "that source," which he identified as the real author of his now regularly recurring visions. They were not elaborate visions, like the Dutch village or the grotesque animals he had seen at the time of his mental breakdown, but crude abstract shapes that seemed to appear on the inside of his eyelids just after he awoke in the middle of the night or in the early-morning hours. Bess found that he could not summon the visions and that they could frequently elude his attempts to record them on the sketch pad he kept by his bed. "I have no control over the duration of the vision (I'm lucky if I have time enough to make a sketch in bed). The only thing I do have is a choice as to which one I will sketch. One night they were all in black and white and happened (changed) so quickly that I sketched and painted only one." Bess also discovered that any of the visions that he didn't copy would be lost forever, his conscious mind was simply unable to retain them.