Moonbase

Well, I blog about pretty much everything else. Why not dreams too? This has been bugging me all morning, so maybe blogging about it will get it out of my system.

One thing about my dreams is that there are a few places and artifacts that seem to be continuous between them. None of them appear in every dream, or even that frequently, but they do appear now and then, sometimes months apart, sometimes years, and occasionally in series of dreams that run over several nights. Some are relatively new; some first appeared when I was a very small child. They aren’t perfectly “stable”, but they are more consistent in content and appearance than one-off dream-objects.

One of my favorite recurring dream-artifacts is my dream-sketchbook. It’s one of those 9×12 spiral-bound deals with the thick cardboard backing and a yellow cover made of heavy paper. Most of the drawings in it aren’t particularly unusual; for the most part it’s the same sort of thing you’d find in one of my normal sketchbooks (though often a bit more polished). There are some sketches from Lunar 8 and other things, a few character sheets, a lot of miscellaneous scribblings, and some assorted sketches from “life” (a few I specifically remember drawing in other dreams). It’s been full for a while now, so I don’t actually draw in it anymore. But it still crops up now and then.

Anyway, this morning I dreamed that one of my old art teachers was using an overhead to critique some of my drawings in front of a class. They were all dream-drawings, though I think only one of them (Rayena asleep in her room at her foster-parents’ house) was from the sketchbook itself. I was flipping through the sketchbook though, and thinking about some of the drawings there in terms of the critiques.

One of several drawings in the sketchbook that stuck with me after I woke up struck me as as kind of interesting. I’ll see if I can describe it … it’s got a kind of Romantic-Orientalist thing going…

Seated in the foreground, at a table or some flat surface, is a clean-shaven man in robes. He’s wearing an odd hat or crown, a tall rectangular-prism shape with a wide, deep slot in it, running front-to-back. The surface is corrugated, giving a very organic impression; the material itself looks a lot like soapstone. Its base is wrapped thickly around with strips of cloth (which may serve to hold it on his head). Some ends of the strips of cloth dangle down behind, strengthening the miter-like impression it gives.

His left arm is folded out of view, and the elbow of his right arm rests on the table, the index finger of that hand pointing upward in a triumphal gesture. Following the direction he is pointing, above him and a bit to his right, in the sky (or ceiling?) we see clouds churning in a spiral as if something is about to emerge. Immediately behind him stand clumps of bearded philosophers, mostly debating among themselves. The nearest philosopher, standing behind and a bit to the wizard/king/priest’s left, is looking away from his fellows, having noticed the churning clouds, and points upwards in alarm.

A curious thing about the central figure is that he has three eyes. The middle one is not in the middle of his forehead or the bridge of his nose, however, but rather set to the left his nose. His left and right eyes are also slightly displaced, lending a Picasso-like effect where you are not entirely sure which way he is supposed to be facing.

I keep wondering whether this isn’t a copy of something I’ve seen somewhere else, although the only thing that comes to mind is Rembrandt’s Feast of Belshazzar which is still rather different. I dunno. Anyway, lemme know if you’ve seen anything like it. Assuming it’s not a copy of anything real, I guess I’ll put the image in the public domain in case anyone finds it interesting to work with. I might make a painting of it someday, but it’s probably still going to be a while before I pick up my paintbrush again.