Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
Quick Reflection on Images
An unexpected thing has been happening this month as I focus on dreams and writing poems, and that’s that I am even more drawn than usual to images. Actual images, like photographs and paintings, not descriptive writing that evokes an image, though that too. I’ve been dreaming — day-dreaming, that is — about making collages of some my photos after altering them to match the feeling of dreaminess I want. The feeling of dreaminess in my head, or my eye, or someplace nearby.
Images, and the manipulation and overlaying of images to create a feeling, a world, or to try to express the feelings and worlds that they evoke in me, have become so strong a pull that I bought a lifetime subscription (on a 33%-off sale) last week to Deep Art Effects, which I’ve used for free for many years, to be able to use more features of it and on my laptop, not just my phone. Then yesterday I signed up for a one-month free trial of Canva Pro; Canva “non-pro” is an app I’ve used a few times over the years, but the Pro version has many more features and makes creating digital art on my laptop much easier than anything else I have access to — except perhaps printing out photos, collaging them on paper (maybe with magazine images or other images that aren’t mine), taking photos of the collages, and redigitising them, which doesn’t sound all that easy when I break it down, but it is almost cost-free. I will likely cancel the Canva trial after the free month but maybe not. I also like to play with Deep Dream Generator and with Picasa editing tools, as well as my phone’s. GIMP is beyond my capabilities, and I don’t have Photoshop.
I was walking outside in the windy snow today thinking about why images are prominent in my headspace now. As I walked, tree bark was catching my eye, the texture, the striations, the blends of colours or the lack of pigment, etc. Last night, I dreamed about dogs, none of whom was barking, but the bark reminded me of them.
Dreams are so visual for me — and maybe for everyone? I wonder what they’re like for people blind from birth. Not that there’s not sound, touch, smell, and taste, but the prominent sense for me in many dreams is sight. I have floor plans and structural features of interior spaces stuck in my mind’s eye from dreams years ago, places that I’ve never visited outside of dreams. I may not, often do not, remember the situation, the dialogue, or even the people but I can see the places still, the relative location of all the furniture and the doors, the hallways, the basements, the attics, the stairways, the porches, decks, patios.
And of course many dreams are set at least partly outside or in a variety of public buildings. Wherever the setting, I can feel how it felt to be there, in that dream, in that dream space. And each place evokes a feeling, or rather a mix of feelings, which are still embodied in me as I go about my waking life years, months, weeks, days, hours later. I’m here, and I’m often also there.
I’ve wished, much more than once, that I could take photos of my dream images. As it is, I can only play with other images until they sort of correspond to the look and feel of my dreams. It’s not quite enough.
Featured image is a boulder with a cairn along a wooded trail, made prismatic.
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