Dream Journal Sketchbook Reflection

I often record my dreams, whether on my phone or in a journal. They are vivid with surreal scenes and imagery that always surprise me from the moment I wake up. Inspired by these detailed imaginings, I decided to bring my Dream Journal to life with the support of illustration.

Because of the complexity of my dreams, I originally wanted to create a journal with colorful, childlike drawings using plenty of space. But, as I played with this idea it became inconsistent and not quite how I imagined it to be. I decided to create minimalistic images that capture the plot or the important aspects of the dream with a short sentence of what happened. As I experimented with this new style, I found the consistency I was looking for. The simplistic, clean look of black pen drawings and details of metallic sharpie add to the surreal effect as my viewer’s can imagine what else happened.

I found that drawing my dreams was great practice for conceptualizing my ideas; it was challenging to create some of them as things like dancing trees and wolf mermaids don’t exist. This creative process required a lot of imagination and recollection based on what I wrote in the past. Even though my dreams are very different from one another in terms of story line and style, I found a theme that worked and offered a euphoric feel that set the mood of each dream. If I was given additional time, I would include more dreams to further show how wild they can get. Also, I would experiment with different materials and styles; I might have developed a style that would work with my original idea of colors and playfulness.