Fanciful dreams
We’ve all had “strange” dreams. That is, dreams that are so ludicrous in some way that we know they can’t be real. And yet, sometimes we’re wrong. They may seem strange, or impossible, but then they aren’t.
One example of that is a dream I had that contained an arresting image. I made several illustrations of it in an attempt to get it right, and then to exploit as an illustration. The final form is above: a giant wooden dog, standing over and protecting a small community.
The dream the image comes from predates my journal by a year. However, it was interesting enough that I made a sketch of what I remembered in my sketchbook, dated 10/30/1988 (below). This sketch is truer to the dream, because the black and white spots were a distinctive characteristic of the large figure and it was built in a cruder fashion, not nearly as elegant as the wood construction of the 3D render. Also notice that in the first sketch (in black and white, on the left) there is no water. I added it as an embellishment to make it more interesting as an image.
The first 3D version of the dog is also one of the first 3D models I’d ever made (below). As a 3D image, it isn’t that good, but it serves to illustrate my interest in the dream image, which happens to be “fanciful.” At no time did I ever expect to see anything resembling this picture, but then I moved to the Netherlands with my family.
The town we moved to, Breda, qualified as inland to the locals, but was only about 20 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Our things were on a boat crossing the Atlantic and the school I taught at, or would teach at, was on summer break, so we had little else to do but explore the countryside.
Nearly every day, my daughter and I took a pair of borrowed bikes onto the many bike paths that criss crossed the country and rode as far as our legs would take us. Sometimes, we made drawings. On none of those occasions, did I see a giant spotted dog. What I did see once, and my daughter saw also, was an oversize black and white spotted sculpture of a cow, designed to advertise a dairy. It reminded me so much of my dream that we stopped our bikes and we both made a drawing of it (below is mine.)
So, it isn’t a dog and it isn’t taller than a house, but it is built the same way, in the same way, with the same coloring, and very similar shapes. Is it close enough? I don’t know. I’d be surprised to ever see anything like it again. As far as I know, the cow sculpture, made out of a large fluids container designed for a semi tractor trailer, is a unique object.
If I remembered the dream that went with the drawing, it would be easier to make a connection between the two, but I only recorded the image. Still, the difference between how I recorded the image from the dream and this real world object is typical of my early efforts to identify something in a dream upon waking instead of trying to record it exactly as remembered.
Only after some trial and error did I learn that trying to conclusively identify something in a dream was much less accurate than writing a description. In this case, the only significant difference is the scale, but even then, it is still a “giant” sculpture of an animal that is many times smaller than the sculpture. That by itself is highly unusual.
In the art world, human and animal subjects are rarely sculpted as larger than life. When they are, as for monumnets, it is most often up to about twice life size, not ten or fifteen times life size, as in this case.
At the very least, the discovery of the giant cow sculpture makes the dream of a giant dog sculpture look less fanciful than it originally did.
PS: For readers who wonder where I’ve been lately, two things:
My computer died recently and I had to have it fixed. During that time, I had limited access to my SubStack.
I have been working on a comic book illustration job that is taking up most of my time. I got behind thanks to several things: 6 days of downtime due to migraines, the computer problem, and an unexpected uptick of interest in my voter roll related research
My computer now works, the comic is almost done, and the election research shouldn’t impinge too much with the other two out of the way. My posting schedule should be back to normal soon.