Drunken Owls and Other Delights

(Translation using AltaVista's Babel Fish Translation, so hopefully the grammar is correct--it's been awhile since I translated French.)

Yet another handful of dreams over the past month in which I am either in a place that, in the dream, I worked at or lived in or frequented, but in reality does not exist...and this ongoing theme in my dreams has once again come up with a variation: creations I've made but never followed through with.

This morning's version was me going through a number of my old files from over the years, like I did when I first moved here. These were files that I hadn't looked at for some years, for one reason or another, but had now just found the time to do so. It had been a good length of time from the creation of the files to now, enough that I'd almost completely forgotten about them. Some of these files were printed and bound versions of some of my current WIPs (one was a version of the first book in the trilogy, complete with random written rewrite notes in the margins), some were infinished story ideas. But the most interesting of the finds was the artwork.

Those who have seen some of my actual real-life artwork know that I'm known for map drawing and thumbnail sketches, as well as random Murph sketches. I'm by no means the best artist (if anything, I'd say I'm a decent 'sketcher'), but I'm kind of happy with most of the drawings I've done.

In this dream, apparently I'd come up with a small handful of indie comic book ideas, most of which never got past a few pages. Apparently I'd never followed through with a lot of this artowrk, either because of loss of interest, lack of ideas, or other personal issues. There were about a half-dozen ideas in there, either test covers, character sheets, or first pages of stories. The artwork, interestingly enough, had extremely varying styles. Two of them in the dream stood out for me, though. There was one that was very Archie Comics-like, and another that was almost a complete rip-off of Terry Moore. And almost all of them were based on female characters. The Archie one was about a woman named Clare who was a college stuedent (and, come to think of it, most likely a contemporary of Murph) with a penchant for getting herself in Archie-like comedic situations. The Moore-like one was about a group of women friends (I'm sensing a theme here), this one with multiple interwoven storylines going on. This one was rather amusing because emmalyon's knitting habits seemed to have snuck in--the storyline I was working on dealt with knitting as some sort of friendship analogy and had the title of "Itchy Felting". Not quite sure where that title came from, but that was it.

The reaction to seeing the artwork in my dreams was interesting, in that I wasn't so much wondering why I didn't follow through (although it was there), as much as wondering if I was still that good, after not doing that sort of work for a number of years. I suppose I've had this same reaction upon reading some of the outtakes of writings I've done in real life, especially the stuff I was writing in the late nineties and onward. A lot of those writings were done during a time when I was either trying to find my own writing style, or just coming up with random ideas when I had no main project going. Some aren't that great, but some are actually worth expanding at some point.


Of course, now I'm thinking that this ongoing 'dream reality' theme in my sleep is great fodder for even more writing ideas. Some of these realities can definitely be used somewhere as a backdrop for some of my stories--in fact, I've definitely done so in the past. My Dreamweaver project was almost entirely set in places I saw in dreams. Of course, the idea of 'dream reality' itself lends to another storyline itself (the ever-famous 'which one is real?' theme) that I could use at some future point.