My kindergarten had a piano. At our end-of-year party, I played a song that I had taught myself as my contribution to the festivities. My first experience with pride, however, was when Mrs. Gilbert showed my drawing to the class and pinned it on the wall for all to see.

My passions were evident and strong at a very early age, and they have lasted all my life. I was born with a love for the arts, and for much of my adult life I have wondered how and/or why this came to be. I don't know what my mother felt about the arts. She succumbed to mental illness when I was quite young. My father never ever took an interest in any aspect of my artistic life, but it didn't matter to me once I attributed his lack of interest to the fact that I was adopted. To me, it wasn't his fault that he and I lived in entirely different worlds. Without realizing it, I was linking my passion for the arts to genetics but it wasn't until my forties that I became convinced that my love of the arts was in my genes.

At age 45, I met my birth mother. The medical need for genetic information to confirm a diagnosis of a genetic heart defect failed to provide the necessary information but it did confirm the origin of my passions. She turned out to be a very passionate artist-a theatre producer who hired visual artists to do all her scenery, lighting and costume design and an accomplished performer herself (she starred in a movie with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni). Her passions were my passions. It made me believe, as I wrote in this column about ten years ago, that my passion for the arts is genetic.

That, I thought, was the end of my quest for understanding as to ?why I loved the arts.? But I had more to learn, as I discovered, when a good friend told me about a dream that she had had the night before. It was a narrative dream with lots of scenes. When she finished her story, I asked her, ?Is that really true? Did you really, truly have that dream? Just like that??

She was offended by my doubt. I had felt comfortable asking her because of the length and depth of our friendship. As our conversation went along, I was able to explain to her that I had never, ever believed anyone who told me that they had had a narrative type of dream. Whenever people told me about dreams with Hollywood plots, I believed people were telling me about daydreams or fantasies, not real dreams. Not what I called dreams anyway. I never revealed my doubt or judged the dreamers, I just took their ?dreams? to be windows into their souls, hopes, fears, etc., but I never believed they were true dreams that you have when you are asleep. And I didn't believe them because I have never had a narrative type of dream.

My dreams seem to me to be a series of single images, sometimes with motion implied. If there is a ?story? to my dream, it is in how I interpret the single image or series of images that constitute my dream. I think of ?dreams? that are a series of still images as being like a photo album: I describe my dream as a narrative, as I might describe a series of seemingly unrelated travel photos from a single trip.

A recent dream of mine, for example, was two still images and one image with motion. Picture one is of a rock the size of a balloon in a garden. The second image is the same image but with a woman's hand in view in the upper right hand corner of the ?frame? of my view and there is an aerosol spray can in the hand that is aimed at the rock. The third image has movement. I see foam from the spray can on the rock and it turns into little squirming worms. When I told people about the dream, I told it as though it was a short, weird movie. I would not break down the images in explaining any dream.

In another wonderful, beautiful dream I saw five exquisite images: a view of a Chinese family eating a meal in their home; a view of a path in a garden of the back of the family?s home; a view from the garden into the downstairs of an adjacent building where an old woman is wearing a beautiful woven floor-length silk coat; a very close up single view of the detail in the woman's coat that showed, at once, its perfect workmanship, value and age; and a view of an outdoor wooden bath with an abundance of surrounding plants. I do not see myself in the dream but, driven by the unbelievable beauty of the coat and its detail that I had seen in my dream, I would always say the same thing to people with whom I wanted to share the dream. ?I had this dream about being in China,? I would say. The concept that I was there is not in the dream, but because it seems like I experience the dream I say that I ?went? to China.

The point is, single or series, my dreams are made up of a series of single images; any narrative linking the images comes with consciousness regained. And this understanding has me convinced that I have discovered more about why I love the visual arts. And thinking in a new way about my dreams has caused me to come to believe my memory is really an image bank and that some (possibly many) of my memories? are really memories of photographs of events in my life and not of the event itself. As with movies that seem so full of action and yet are nothing more than still images projected at a specific speed, my memories and dreams are all still images.

Now I know why I love to write about the work of artist friends who want an essay on their work or to help them with their artist's statements. I love finding the narrative that links the series of images that comprise their exhibitions. I love interpreting the images and besides writing about them, I love just looking at them. I love searching for meaning in the obscure. I love attending visual art exhibitions, searching for meaning in the ?dream images? of others.

I had only part of the answer about why I love the visual arts when I learned about my birth mother. What I got in my genes was a way of seeing the world. Again, I think I know why I love the visual arts, but maybe there is even more to learn in my years ahead.