A Dream About the Birth of Venus, on Venus

oil – 23×30 – NFS

Un rêve sur la naissance de Vénus, sur Vénus

Monday February 19, 1951, 19:36 – Hampton, VA, USA. This story was recounted to me by a gentleman called Roger H.

My dad Paul worked for NACA (later NASA) and he would eventually be one of the engineers working to rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts. He would never discuss details of his work, instead weaving exotic extra-terrestrial tales of travel to other planets and galaxies. During one of those nightly story-telling episodes I found myself dozing off with visions of his words flying around in my head.

His stories were always interesting but were also subtly educational. As he often did, he began walking through the planets in our solar system and when he got to Venus, explaining its makeup, the heat and its proximity to our earth, I recall seeing a vision.

It was a weird inhospitable scene. He described it as likely hot. Unimaginably hot. Earth, visible in my dream would likely be invisible from there. It had to be Venus. In the midst of this alien landscape where the surface would also be hard to see (as we would later learn) an apparition of a familiar sort took form. It was a beautiful vision that was clearly out of place yet somehow felt right at home.

It could only be Venus herself. Not exactly the way Sandro Botticelli imagined her, but, hey it’s my dream…