Kind of weird that the same day I did the post about dream images in my own art I ran across this video, in which John Frame talks about how a dream set him on an artistic odyssey that he has been on for the last six years:
He says (along about 6:45):
I went to bed at about 1:00 in the morning and at about two o'clock in the morning I felt this push. And I was pushed back into consciousness in a very strange way. When I awakened I was in contact with my dream state. I now know that this is called the hypnopomppic state. It's a state where were bridged between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, to the subconscious mind, the dream world. And in that state I could see a new world that I've never seen before. And it was very very complete. It had characters, it had architecture, it had landscape, things I'd never seen before. It had a art forms that I've never seen before. The one thing I was familiar with was that these were my characters who were inhabiting this world, but they moved, that's the critical thing. It was an amazing opportunity to stay in contact with the dream world and between about 2 o'clock in the morning at about 5:30 or six in the morning I simply looked at this world and attempted to memorize it. I just I just wanted to see and remember every single detail about was in front of me. About 5:30 or six in the morning my wife awakened. I was literally afraid to move. I asked her if she would bring the paper and pencil, and I started writing down the things that I had seen in as much detail as I could possibly capture. I was in that state of suspension between the dream world the waking world for about 12 hours. It simply didn't go away. This is technically known as the hypnopompic state and ordinarily we just get a tiny glimpse of that, but in my case I suspended there, and at the end of this when I had captured as much for the information as I possibly could, I realized I was now going to embark on a professional life as a filmmaker, as an animator, doing stop-motion animation with these characters that I had created.
The world he has created is here in this amazing video, which I first discovered on Lynda Barry's amazing tumblr site The Nearsighted Monkey
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