EARLIER

A few days back I painted a sketch of a cliff and a crescent moon echoing the shape of the wood panel it's on. Looked good, but a little empty.

Today, I suddenly find myself drawing in one figure, a fox/cat girl whose white belly echoes the crescents of the panel and moon. Yes. She seems to fit.

More? Or is it done now?

THAT NIGHT

I'm in an art class in a crowded two-floor complex. I go through a stack of my old art, but find a recent project misfiled--a furry watercolor comic with a fox-girl and a unicorn, as if Hiroshige drew Terri Smith's furry comic "Xanadu".

The colorscheme of the painted panels: full color, but all except true blue are suffused with the paper's warm yellowish beige. Looks very rich, despite the modest contrast--few darks, all medium to white.

I've only painted every other panel, leaving half of them bare paper, a warm offwhite. And only 4 or 6 per page, so it's less a checkerboard than an open architecture. Like a city full of wilderness preserves!

Do I intend to fill it in? You know... I kinda doubt I should. Looks good half-empty! Zen toon. Leave it so.

NOTES THE NEXT MORNING

ACTION: the dream has spoken. Declare that painting done.

ACTION: open up my comix, too! More open spaces. Because those dream-comix looked better than my waking work.

2015 NOTE

I included this piece to show how even my nondream art gets vetted by my dreams. Often they do suggest changes, making the resulting art clearly dream-influenced.

But what of pieces like this, where my dreams say "leave well enough alone"? Surely approval and "enough is enough" is as vital a critique as disapproval and forced revision! Yet I tend to undervalue, even fail to credit such dreams--dreams saying yes, not no.

Do you?

Such affirmative dreams aren't confined to art. Dreams often reassure, not critique, timid or marginalized dreamworkers. Freud and Jung and indeed most dream pundits emphasize the uncomfortable, the warnings, the nos. But just as dreams can inject doubt into complacent or overconfident people, they can hearten those of us who are, by nature or nurture, already full of doubt.

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