Watery dream

Ink & watercolor in HandBook Co square sketchbook
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

For years I used to get up every morning and sketch my dreams before I did anything else. I have volumes of dream journals full of weird, amusing or x-rated drawings, depending on what the night had in store for me. I often painted the images too. I’m not sure when or why I stopped but I recently discovered an artist who works primarily from her dreams in monotype, Denise Kester, and got inspired to explore my dreams again.

My dreams are often humorous (to me anyway, but then I’m easily amused) or insightful — sometimes I wake up having invented something important and funny, as I illustrated here (one of my very favorite posts) or just quirky, like this one.

In the quickly sketched image above from last night, I dreamt that Sharon and I were canooeing down a pretty river when I realized that we had sunk up to our necks and that I was still wearing my fanny pack containing all my electronic gadgets (cell phone, digital camera, PDA) and they were all ruined. There was more about trying to put on ill-fitting overalls after nude sunbathing but I always hate it in novels when writers go on and on about a character’s dreams so I won’t bore you further with this one.

One last thing, this image of a river with tall banks is the same one I tried to make when I was 10 and convinced my father to let me paint with his oil paints. Unfortunately he gave me a piece of waxy palette paper to paint on and I remember it being so terribly frustrating to not be able to capture the image or anything at all, really, on that horrid paper. It kept me from trying to paint again for another 20 years.