Themes and Fascinations

Negative Space


Dark Lords


Landscapes


Inversion of expectations


Female characters


Religion and spirutality


Politics and rebellion



The Qualities, Atmosphere and Sensiblities of my Dream Experiences
I am sometimes a lucid dreamer and find myself realising I am dreaming to some degree and then became intrigued by the feeling of having escaped the dreamstory and exploring the unreality world of the dream or doing things that are not possible in everyday life.

My dreams are often about landscapes or massive vistas. They look a bit like this sometimes


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Martin,_John_-_The_Plains_of_Heaven_-_1851-1853.jpg


Well perhaps not so much like a biblical romantic painting, but certainly with that vibrancy and sense of scale. That painting is by John Martin btw, a English 19th century romantic who typically did huge canvases, some of them are several metres across and mostly of wondrous and dramatic vistas. A lot of these paintings are in the Tate Gallery in London. I had an interest in the history or art at one point and spent a lot of time in galleries and some of the London ones I know very well. I used to draw a lot and paint in those days too and do illustrations for my own or others fictions, but haven’t done that for a long time.

There are times in dreams when I can be very high above landscapes and moving in and around them or over them. Not infrequently they can look a bit like this.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Caldera_%28Santorini%29.jpg


The above is actually Santorini island in Greece, one of the most amazing places I have ever been to. It is a volcanic island where a terrible eruption took place about 5000 years ago and the middle of the island was elected and the sea flooded in, leaving the remains of the original circular island as a kind of outer ring of fragments, with one large island on the east with high cliffs looking over the still active caldera and the big lagoon where most of the original island was. The main town of Thera is built along the cliffs looking out over the volcano and at sunset people gather in rooftop gardens and galleries and watch the sun go down. There are also volcanic sand beaches on the outer rim of the main island – both black and red sand, the black sand is very hot to walk on without footwear! And there is the remains of a prehistoric city that was buried by volcanic ash 5,000 years ago, but the people must have know what was going to happen and escaped as no human remains were found there.

I also dream a fair bit about buildings, which feel like sheltered or intricate worlds or worlds within worlds with different levels. The following is an airport interior by Finnish architect Aero Saranen that gives a bit of the impression of this
http://www.ronsaari.com/stockImages/nyc/TWATerminalInterior.jpg

Often I will see a landscape or part of it in the distance in a dream and realise I have been there in another dream before and sometimes revisit it to find it has changed in some way, or it is a different season or time of the day or the people there I don’t recognise. I suppose this kind of dream experience might be seeing parts of yourself and how they are changing or seeing something about yourself differently. The landscapes are not empty, they often have people and places and events going on and sometimes quite strange things. They can be cities or parts of cities.

I also have all manner of dreams, being in stories like books, interacting with people I know in a slight feeling of unreality, or being on other worlds or being other things or people. I quite often dream of cataclysms; huge tidal waves or floods. But the strange thing is they always feel like positive dreams. The tidal wave will strike but I will remain afterwards, not hurt but kind of refreshed. I had a dream a year or so ago where I was on an island and several successive waves washed over the island, each smaller and less devastating than the last until it calmed to a placid sea with a clear morning feel and Flotsam and jetsam bobbing along the sea shore and laying on the beach.