Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men

As the artist sleeps the night after the birthday party, the artist's son has a dream. He travels through these long broad tunnels of cauliflowers into a large and open lake where birds with little birthday notes in their beaks dive from left to right and right to left again. Fish of all colours leap from the water and soar through these multi-coloured rings held by fantastic stand-up cherubs in the clouds. He makes it through entirely and lands on a giant leaf, getting caught in the current. Then he travels faster and faster, towards a giant waterfall, and after a while goes sailing over the edge, gliding like a leaf himself, cutting through the air like a paper dart, and by the time he lands at the bottom, he is lying on his back with a broad five-year-old grin on his face and with his little presents beside him, waving at the friendly gorillas in the trees, nodding at the odd hippo's head emerging from the water, and belly-laughing with the pikes. There is no doubting it: he is happy in this dream, and he bears none of the anxiety befalling some of the crabs at the bottom of the lake. He looks up with an air of bliss as he continues through the water and spots high above himself a flying pig. He so wants to be up there himself - he likes pigs - that he wills himself into the air like a magnificent boy in a flying machine and starts - as if by magic - flying higher and higher. As he looks down he can just about see everything - the wooden huts being built at a rate of 3 million a second, the factories churning out custard pies, the armies gathering in the distance with their feet stuck in concrete. My, he shakes his head and goes even higher. He feels the warmth of the sun and suddenly remembers the chocolate car in his pocket. Better eat it before it melts, he thinks. And so he does. 'I like birthdays,' he whispers, to the make-believe earth below. 'I really do.' This last phrase wakes up the artist, but not yet the artist's son.

Art on a sleeve

Lying in bed together with the foxes, maybe even rats, rustling ungovernably through the last of the weeds on the other side of the window, the artist has a panic attack about her work. Anguish rises from the propped-up pillow like a burning cactus and all reason in the room is suddenly smoked out. The artist’s lot, I am thinking, can be an unhappy one, and being an artist is not just about getting a show, though this counts high enough on my list to hang a regime of hope upon it. No, it’s about maintaining the right environment to work in, too, and I don't know how good I am at that. The children in the other room meanwhile snore on like little seraphs in their bunk beds, their growing-pain drawings blue-tacked joyously to the wall. As I remember it now, the boy actually falls out of the bottom bunk, rendering the artist momentarily obsolete as she rushes out of bed and sweeps him up like a mother. (Not that the idea of an artist and mother is an incompatible one in this household: not with this one's art.) Moments later, the whole flat is creaking, as if sharing in the family’s general aches and pains. This entry wouldn't be complete without mention also of the additional financial pressures tapping at the window like a character out of a zipped up Dickens novel. Don't get me wrong: we are trying as nobly as possible to find a creative way out and proudly and foolishly are nailing our futures – and for all I know our children’s futures too - to a creative mast, yes, in a world full of shark-like submarines. Later in the long night, I hear sirens speed past and think sleeplessly of the word liberation. I turn quietly to the artist. She is asleep now and her anguish settled. Tiny snores from the next room are my only accompaniment as I brush her cheeks and place one palm briefly on her shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. As she sleeps on, I can just about make out a smile. Don’t stop, I'm thinking. Dream on, dear artist. Please don’t stop. I find myself beside you.

Gaudy yellow rackets and maroon foam balls

The artist stands fetchingly on a short plastic shiny blue stool in order to reach the parts other artists cannot reach: today is the last day for this piece. Every inch is under scrutiny. Among the newspapers on the floor is a large photograph of boys playing in a flooded part of Kolkata (Calcutta). But the only thing falling today is dust from the artist's materials. I spend most of the afternoon keeping a distance and playing a crude form of tennis with the little people. At one stage I pick up the gaudy yellow racket and hit the perky maroon foam ball so high into the blue sky it seems to go on and up forever, higher and higher, above the dark-green foliage and ivy-strangled linden tree, above the flat belonging to the depressed young couple and their need for three cars, above the charming Irish man and woman in their sixties, above the shy young man's flat at the top, and higher still, as if towards the passing white cloud, so high in the end my daughter says out loud that she thinks she's having a dream, but then, just then, as if woken from the dream, the now not so perky maroon foam ball admits defeats, admits to a kind of homesickness, and returns, slamming bouncily, to the grass again. I really thought I was having a dream, she repeats. I return inside to tell the artist what our daughter said and write it down. But the artist is working and in some kind of dream herself. I've discussed completion before but never the enduring habit of artists to dream. Art and its execution is like time out, like Kurt Vonnegut's mirrors or 'leaks' in Breakfast of Champions. Just like my daughter's take on the ever-rising perky maroon foam ball.