Fever Dreams and Labours of Love

Have you ever woken from a dream so vivid that you believed it was true long after you woke up?

Sometimes I think that creative work is like a self-induced fever dream: images and emotions so real in our mind's eye that we can almost touch them... but those visions quickly fade and disappear forever into the shadowlands if we don't do something to make them real. Creative work is about finding ways to keep fuelling the fire and building a solid bridge between the world of imagination and the tangible reality of everyday life.

The process of creativity could also be imagined in relation to one of the most basic human instincts for survival: procreation and the arrival of a new generation of ideas. Initial conception combines micro-elements of inspiration and of practical realities, the resulting embryo is nurtured and guarded well during development over an appropriate length of time... and only delivered after the hard work and challenges inherent in any labour of love have been successfully completed.

What are you doing to bring your dreams into the open and make them real today?

Living in a Dream World

As a graphic designer, pretty much all the visual work I do is for others. It tends to be done with deliberation and purpose, towards a particular destination and on a fairly strict schedule. It's a journey with a map and a timetable—although it may involve occasional spontaneous side trips—and it tends to involve a whole lot of other people on the tour. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I'm actually even a traveller, or if I am the bus driver. :)

As an artist, the work I do is more often just for myself... but I find it challenging to break out of the corporate design routine and allow myself some relaxed visual playtime, to wander along an unexplored path on my own, for no real purpose and with no fixed destination in mind, just following where inspiration beckons.

(Note to all the professional fine artists out there: I'm definitely NOT saying that design is work and art is play - they each require elements of both... just that for me, the playtime part of my design work always seems to be done with one eye on the clock and one hand on the wheel.)

It occurs to me that dreams offer a great model for play in the creative process: in dreams, we seem to be able to explore the world in a completely different way. We suspend our logic and belief systems and just go where the dream takes us.

I'm pretty tired this morning, and really not all that keen to wake up completely—or to work hard at writing anything sensible or profound—so instead, today I am simply sharing a series of images from a colourful dreamtime journey, a play-time exploration from the seed of a dream-like image, a reflection of departure from the office at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the winter. 

Building / Growing

I had a dream about a quilt the other night (yes, quilts are on my mind 24 hours a day!) The pattern was simple and very attractive to me; but even in my dream, my brain was sifting and analyzing to figure it out, to define a deeper meaning, a logical reason why it should be this way and no other (sad but true...this is the way my brain works—problem-solving and pattern seeking even while I'm sleeping—no wonder I'm tired when I wake up!)

When I tumbled out of bed, I went straight to my computer and worked through some tangible responses to my initial vision (depicted above) to define the elements that had meaning for me, extracting the two interpretations shown below.

The arrangement of evenly spaced horizontal rectangles piled one upon the other, creates a solid brick wall. This image speaks to me of stability: warmth and shelter that will endure and withstand the storms and vagaries of time; it represents the things we understand very well and know how to make for ourselves.

But my original vision was in brighter, softer shades which spoke to me of nature, alive and growing... so I altered the shapes in this second version to be vertical, varied and verdant (how's that for alliteration?) This image is all about the mystery of life that sprouts without our help and renews itself despite our misguided or unintentional efforts to suppress it; it speaks of freshness, individuality, and the breeze of inspiration blowing through us.

In the end, I like all three designs... but what sense did my analytical mind make of my dream? It told me that all things are made of basic building blocks, but how we choose to arrange them in our imagination has the power to determine what we perceive.