Dream journal sketches
In the early days of my dream journal, I made sketches to augment my record directly into the journal. These were almost always drawn with whatever pen I used to write the dream with. Later, I added a single color from a highlighter marker, then I put my set of colored pencils near my bed and used those. I’ve also done a few sketches in watercolor. Later, I started drawing on my iPad. Now, I hardly ever make drawings of my dreams.
There are two reasons. The first is that my dream journal became all digital several years ago, so there is no paper record of the dreams any longer, and thus, no paper to draw on. I did this to save the time spent transcribing my handwritten record into my computer. Doing that used to take me about three days every month. Now, by emailing them to myself, there is no need for transcription, though I do have to transfer the email to my database. This process has the additional advantage of creating an independent time-stamped record, should that ever become useful for evidentiary reasons.
The second reason is that drawing on my iPad now causes pain in my eyes. That started happening around 2019, so I stopped using the iPad to draw. It’s a pity, because I enjoyed drawing with it. When I draw images of my dreams now, it is on my desktop computer, using a program called Autodesk Sketchbook. The only reason this is important is that it is less immediate than when I made the drawing in bed immediately after waking. That doesn’t mean the drawings are incorrect, but that I am less interested in making the quantity of drawings I might have otherwise made. For instance, I have dream journal records that include well over a dozen drawings. Now, one is about all I feel like making.
My earliest journal sketches tend to be important for evidentiary reasons but are awful from an artistic perspective. In the early days of the journal, I wasn’t planning to make drawings, but sometimes I had to for the sake of describing the dream. I made the drawings in the dark without a light, while trying to avoid waking my wife. My art skills hadn’t developed yet, nor was I in the mood to put a lot of time into them, so they are best described as thumbnails. Regardless, they had enough information that they could be used to confirm the dreams.
For instance, on June 10, 1990, I woke up from a dream wherein I’d observed a conversation between my aunt and uncle regarding a painting made by my uncle, which I made a sketch of in the journal. At the time, I lived in New Jersey and they lived in Minnesota. I didn’t know them well, and had only seen them twice in my life (now three times). I did have an uncle who made a living as an artist, but not the uncle in the dream. This uncle was just learning how to be an IT specialist after being a house husband and soccer coach.
Because I had no expectation that this uncle would ever make a painting, it seemed odd to be dreaming that he had. In the conversation I observed in the dream, he was speaking of his painting in a positive way, but my aunt seemed less impressed. With this information, I called my aunt at work in Minnesota, got her fax number, and sent the drawing. It turned out the dream made sense in the context of a conversation she’d had with my uncle that morning.
My uncle who was a professional artist had visited them a week earlier. This had inspired my uncle who isn’t an artist to make his first painting. He’d finished it the day of my dream. The following morning, at about the time I dreamed it, my uncle had tried to mount the painting in the kitchen. My aunt didn’t like the painting and didn’t want it in the kitchen. That is what they were discussing. See below for the sketch I sent my aunt and the photo she sent back. There is an error and an omission, but for the most part, it is as good a match as I would expect of myself if I’d seen the painting in a gallery and tried to draw it from memory after getting home.
My oldest dream journal sketches are very rough, but even these are enough for the sake of comparison. On February 5, 1990, I dreamed that I observed a meeting of editors and designers at Time Magazine as they decided what their next cover would be. I had a hard time describing it, so I made a sketch. Even then, I had to refine it a couple times to get it right. The next issue, which I saw a couple days later, had a matching cover. When you look at the sketch, you might think, “wait a minute, that doesn’t match.” Allow me to explain, and keep in mind that at the time, I was still thinking of the journal as something I was making for myself, not that other people would see.
The drawing started as a small rectangle with the word “landscape” because it looked like a landscape for some reason. I think this is because the cover is filled top to bottom with people in camoflauge designed to blend into a landscape.
However, I knew that was wrong, so I made a bigger rectangle and and drew a couple of evenly spaced objects and wrote “Lots of little objects.” Again, I wasn’t seeing it clearly, but understood that what at first looked like a wall of landscape color acttually had a layer of sub-objects.
I then realized what it was and made another rectangle, this in the proportions of the cover, and made a sketch indicating rows of soldiers, with the words “People (soldiers)” and “Collage.” All I meant by “collage” is that it was photographic, not an illustration.
The actual coover was rows of soldiers in a photo. I checked every Time cover to see if any other prior to that date resembled it. None did. This was the only cover ever made by Time that resembled my sketch, and it was the first to come out after I made it.
Sometimes, I go all out with a dream journal image. Here is an example that became an acrylic painting and a computer rendering:
This last pair of images was from a very interesting dream that I’ll write about separately. In the meantime, Merry Christmas!
WOW