Dream Journal Project
The Night World Vol. 1 & 2
Our dreams are important.
Our dreams have things to tell us and teach us.
Our dreams have questions they want to ask us.
Over the summer of 2019, I worked exclusively on putting together a journal of some of my most intriguing dreams. This project was first and foremost a way for me to connect with myself on a deeper level. It was an extremely personal project — the most personal project I have worked on since my college days some 20 years ago.
My idea for The Night World Vol. 1 was to illustrate dreams in watercolor and pen and ink and then collage snippets of text onto the images. It took some time to flush out what the text would exactly be, but I had the strange idea to take lyrics from a favorite album and combine them with the images. This proved an excellent challenge. I found the process of selecting lyrics for the specific images to be a way for my conscious and subconscious minds to work together – an activity that no doubt happens when we dream and are able to remember the dream.
I sent the volume I had completed in 2019 off to the Brooklyn Art Library to be added to their Sketchbook Project which happens to be the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world. It will remain permanently in their collection.
It was hard to say goodbye to a beloved and personal project. Since the experience was healing and enriching, I decided to create a second volume with the same sequence of images and dreams again in 2020. I now have a sister volume of my own — The Night World Vol. 2
I have taken the time to document all of my work on this project and have put together a series of videos that both explain and show the process of creating The Night World Vol. 2.