Dream drawings

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. Particularly lucid dreams and related phenomena, but that’s another story. My dreams are mostly bizarre and somewhat abstract, so I’d like to share some illustrations I’ve made attempting to capture those experiences. I don’t believe that these images carry any complex hidden meanings or messages about my life, but they almost certainly reflect on my mood, recent experiences, and ways of thinking. The brain is a modelling machine and I see dreams as the result of feeding this machinery back onto itself. The narrow stabilizing thread of real-world sensory input is cut, and the brain’s predictive expectations whisk you away in an eddying stream of hallucination. Some of these I find particularly compelling, and so I’ve taken to drawing them out when I can.

This was my first dream-drawing. I saw a chain of bloody, severed hands crawling below a disembodied floating mechanical head. I cleaned up the gory hands a bit for the illustration.

 

This image came to me while I was on the edge of sleep. I was at my desk. Hit with a wave of exhaustion, I put my head in my hands for a bit. As I faced downwards, I saw-magined a ladder sprouting from my tongue and growing down into a well. My point of view shifted to third person and revealed me as a pale and pupil-less puppet reminiscent of the animated James in James and the Giant Peach.

This digital tablet painting was inspired by a dream fragment where a robed man rode a hand up a rocky cliff out of the sea. I added the basalt-column-esque gem substrate and the ship, but I think the robe is pretty accurate. I posted this in another entry about digital painting work, but it’s relevant here too.

This isn’t really a dream drawing, but sort of related. I suffer from eczema, a (non contagious) chronic skin problem involving dry itchy rashes. Sometimes when it gets bad, itchiness leaks into my dreams as I concoct elaborate justifications for my nighttime scratching. Other times I just can’t sleep. One of these times, at 3AM and tortured by my irritated neck, I decided to try drawing the sensation of oppressive itchiness. This was the result.