What Dreams May Come

When I go to sleep at night I am merely stepping into another world.  It’s a world of marvels and awe.  It can also be one of terrible horrors.  But above all else, it is a world of shapes.

 

The other night at 2:36 AM I sat up out of bed, wide awake, with a new shape etched into my mind.  While the shape was somewhat similar to one that I had carved before, what was before me now was a wild variant, one that screamed out demanding to be carved.  And until I do so there will be the very slightest feel of unease, a sense that something remains undone, until I make it so.  So goes yume.

“Yume” is the Japanese word for dreams, a word that for me best describes this dream-based designing that is so much a part of my art.  Being a vivid dreamer I have learned to take full advantage of my nightly dreamscape, one where the laws of physics and reason are suspended in favor of a netherworld that defies description in earthly terms.  My world of Yume is a tapestry woven in rich and often inexplicable images that in waking hours are only expressed in terms that are defined by lingering wisps.  And as the sun slips over the horizon and blazes its fiery path through the sky, those remnants of Yume wither away, most of them forever lost, replaced by the reality of our shared world.

So, from my inner world of dreams, in that place that I call Yume, comes images that are translated to the waking world to become part of my art.  There are also other images, most in fact, that can never make the journey, those that are too ethereal or without an adequate point of reference. Still others, often epically horrible, are best forgotten and left to evaporate like dew on grass in the warm light of the rising sun.

That is how much of my work begins, in the night, in a place called Yume.