johns did not describe the dream as a symbol to decode. he treated it as an instruction. he got up, bought materials, and began. the short distance between recall and action defines the account.
one night i dreamed that i painted a large american flag, and the next morning i got up and i went out and bought the materials to begin it.
johns used encaustic, which is pigment in hot wax over strips of newsprint. ordinary paint dried too slowly and blurred, while wax held each stroke. flag now hangs in moma. its central question influenced johns’s later work and pop art: is this a flag or a painting of one?
the record is only one sentence, repeated by the artist across decades of interviews. the dream gave johns a clear picture rather than an explanation. he acted on it the next morning. this is the most direct example here of moving from a remembered image to a finished work.