There are recurring depictions of fantastical creatures, humans-animal and human-plant hybrids in close interrelations in Murni’s body of work. Their prevalence could be attributed to Murni’s sleep habits, as she may have been a lucid dreamer. Her partner Edmoundo Zanolini describes her interactivity during REM sleep [or in a trance]: “She would eventually have a dream and start talking. I would be next to her, and I could talk and ask her about it, and so on. She would continue to sleep, yet be interactive—meaning she would reply to me in her sleep. She was absolutely coherent.” As Murni allows her unconscious to take the lead in her amalgamated illogical scenes with strange creatures, she brings alive the conditions of her dreams to reality.
Mata Lindung (Moray Eyes) depicts the underside of a starfish with its mouth resembling the vagina. Two peeking eyes are seen at the corner of the canvas. This painting shows Murni’s witty and humorous nature with its multiple visual puns and double entendres. Similar to layur, lindung or moray eel presents phallic undertones as a counterpart to the starfish mouth. Lindung, in Bahasa Indonesia, also means ‘to protect’. The difference between the word for the animal and the action can only be discerned contextually as it is homonymic. Thus, this painting poses the precarious relation between vagina and the phallus, the ever present uncertainty towards its intention: to invade or to protect.