I've often thought about this.
In a dream, its like a whole world is generated before your (dream) eyes. When I explore my lucid dreams, it's amazing to me that around every corner is something I might not expect. It's from my own mind, but I can't predict it. I can tell my mind to show me something I wouldn't expect, and it does. And in some dreams I see cool pieces of art or hear great music which doesn't exist in real life, which I couldn't make myself in real life.
For music, a couple times I've remembered the melody for a little bit after waking up, but ended up forgetting it.
There was once where I recreated music I heard in a dream. In the dream, I was out on my bike during a very blue dusk, in a bad part of town. I remembered that there was a mass murder that took place around where I was, really recently. Then, I heard this dark ambient droning sound. Weirdly enough, in the dream I recognized it as non-diegetic, like it was just part of the dream's soundtrack. The sound really stuck in my head and I tried to recreate it with a synthesizer when I woke up. I can't know for sure now, but I remember thinking when I finished it that it really sounded like what I heard in the dream. You can hear it here:
https://vocaroo.com/i/s0nZRXEkVrLX
Oh, I remember another. I had a dream in which I was watching some movie. I think it was a Wes Anderson movie... There was a scene where two characters were playing tennis. But the colors were extremely garish and strange, and the composition seemed to be designed to be intentionally unappealing, I think to symbolize the incongruous relationship of these characters, or something like that. I remember thinking that in the dream. It was extremely flat looking. When I woke up I decided to try to make it just to show my GF how strange it was. Just imagine that the characters are actual live action people:
movie in dream.JPG
(that opens higher resolution when you click it right...?)
Both these examples are admittedly pretty simple, most of the more complex stuff seems to leave my mind pretty fast after waking up.
I think my most successful attempt at creating art of something I've seen in a dream was this one.
In the dream, my friend and I were in some dark empty mall. My friend had a flashlight, and we were exploring, I guess. At the end of the big hall we were in, there were three bizarrely tall mannequins in strange poses, each standing on a small pedestal. We probably weren't even as tall as one of their legs.
Basically I saw one of them move, and then move back to its original pose and told my friend to shine his light back on it, and that's the moment I tried to capture in this painting:
DED3.jpg
As for creating art in a lucid dream... I don't think I ever have, but I've always wanted to try. I just never remember to. I really wonder what that would be like, if I would be limited to what I could achieve in real life, or if things beyond my ability would come out. Then I wonder if that would just be an illusion, or if in the dream my "true unconscious ability" is unlocked or something.
I do have some ideas about what could help the waking imagination reach the same level of focus. I mean, maybe not the same. But I think it can improve a lot.
Right now, I'm focusing my art practice on memory and visualization.
I've noticed that, after reading some novel for a while, when I go to write something, I often write like the author I was reading. Not on purpose, but just automatically.
Then I noticed this happen with art as well. On days when I sort a lot of reference pics, for example, or find a bunch of art I like and end up looking at it a lot, I notice that the art I make somehow resembles what I've been looking at. As an example, there was a day when I was downloading and sorting a bunch of reference pics, most of them were of places in central and eastern Europe, like Poland and Russia.
Once I was done, whenever I closed my eyes I would see images of places that looked like they were in central or eastern Europe. But they weren't any of the photos I looked at. It was like my mind was generating new images just based on the photos I had been looking at. And I found that my visualization abilities were much stronger than normal, and I was able to draw from it with better results than normal.
So I've been trying this kind of thing, emphasizing visual input a lot. I'm trying not to draw directly from reference anymore but to rather look at a lot of references beforehand and then draw afterward. I think it's strengthening my memory and my ability to visualize.
The artist Claire Wendling has talked about doing this as well, which I thought was interesting. She really doesn't like drawing from reference ever. So instead, when she needs to know how something looks, she'll google it, look at a ton of pictures of it, then draw afterward, and not draw while looking at the pictures.
Robert Henri also has talked about emphasizing memory training in art. In The Art Spirit I recall him having written about the idea of a new kind of art school, where there were two main rooms. One where a model would pose, and the students could come into this room just to observe the model. Then the students would enter the next room over to draw what they observed. They would be able to re-enter the room with the model at any time, but when they drew, they had to be in the other room, unable to see the model. I think he thought it would be too different to gain much support though.
I also recall that Kim Jung Gi has said that during the times of his life when he was unable to draw (since he's Korean he had to enter the military at a certain age), he would look around and just imagine drawing what he saw. He would imagine tracing lines over everything around him. This I think is a similar concept. He's constantly absorbing visual information in the language of drawing, you know what I mean?
Anyway, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do recently, emphasizing input, memory, and visualization, and I'm finding it's working well for me in being able to draw things from my imagination and from memory.
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