of things". Clinical psychologist Eliot Adler (invited by art historian Matthew Baigell to make some observations about four of Dickinson's pictures, based evidently only on the information in Lloyd Goodrich's 1965 catalogue) took Dickinson's remark about searching for fossils "in his native country" as linking the picture's terrain with "the earth from which he sprang". In addition to references to death and a return to the earth, Adler points to imagery that suggests birth from an Earth Mother, including the "distinctly labial" drapery. Ward agrees, pointing to the woman apparently emerging from a void in the rocky cliff (in the preferred birth orientation, head first) through the drawn-back curtains. He suggests that the idea of Mother Earth as the picture's setting is deliberate, as indicated by a clue Dickinson left. Just above the emerging woman is a breast presented as part of the rock formation. Although it matches the rocks in value and hue, its spherical shape, reinforced by its cast shadow, and the suggestion of a nipple, make the metaphor clear. Dickinson at one point had painted a seated nude at the top of the picture, and Adler identifies her as the mother from which his sister at the lower right and he himself (whom Adler identifies as the old man) were born. The identification of his brother with Beethoven (not known of by Adler) strengthens the idea. The breast, then, may be understood as a more subtle reference to Mother Earth than the nude it replaced. Dickinson described the two reclining figures as sleeping, which suggests that the scene may be dreamed by the old man, who imagines himself as asleep on his mother's body, comforted by the memories of loved ones. Ward suggests that a specific dream Dickinson described in a letter may also explain an important part of the painting's meaning, particularly because he seems to have been reminded of it by the topic he had just been discussing. On November 12, 1926, four days before he began painting his picture, but eleven days after he began planning it, he wrote of the upcoming Beethoven centennial and of a Buffalo man who had met Beethoven. Then with no transition he wrote, "Dreamed last night I saved a man from drowning in Havanna [sic] harbor." Since writing about Beethoven seems to have reminded him of his dream, Ward suggests that the man he saved in his dream