In dream dictionaries . . .
Airplanes represent:
Transcendence: Rising above limitation; perspective, elevation.
Aspiration / Ambition: Movement toward goals or ideals.
Transition: Departure, journey, or change of state.
Mummies represent:
Stasis: Something frozen in time; refusal or inability to let change occur
When mummies “come alive” in dreams, it can reflect the resurfacing of old material—memories, relationships, traumas—that were supposed to stay buried.
A mummy can symbolize the parts of the Self wrapped up—grief, anger, or desire that’s been bound and sealed rather than processed.
So if we are assuming “Airplanes & Mummies” operates the way a dream does, as a drama about the Self playing out on the stage of the unconscious, one interpretation is that the Shadow (Mummy) refuses to let go of past pain and allow itself to “die” so that the psyche can be reborn new. Airplanes represent Ego, which seeks to defeat the Shadow from limiting lofty ambitions and preventing change. This suggests that the Self is at war between the preserved past and the desire to move on. The artist has said in interviews that part of the work is of course the many interpretations that the audience projects onto it. But because what is depicted in the images is not actually random, because it is rising from somatic logic that the artist is tracking, it can make an intuitive kind of sense on sight that bears out conscious interpretation.