I've been sketching dreams for awhile now. not the whole dream, but if there's a particular scene that made an impression on me, or just the general light/ambiance of the dream, that i can't quite capture in words. Alot of times, I'll just keep alot of colored pencils along with my notebook, and color in the margins the colors that match the dream or my mood. This has no form and isn't recognizable at all, and yet, I find when I come back to read the dream months later, just having the colors there makes my memory SO much more vivid. I spend a long time trying to get the colors right though.

The problem with drawing is it's so concrete. words were meant to deal with abstract concepts, and even if you can't describe something adequately with words, you can still imagine it. For myself at least, when I look at a sketch, I tend to see only the drawing, as the whole rendering of the dream(does that make sense?). Drawings seem more final, more definite. maybe it's just because of the way I draw, and I need to adopt a more abstract technique. But dream images are very fluid, always changing, and often you never get a good visual image that can easily be transferred to paper.

and then there's times when I can't begin to describe something adequately and only a picture will do(the ol' "picture's worth a thousand words", as somebody said) Really, I need both drawings and words to record my dreams.

Bizzy