I had so many tattoos, more than the single one that I have on my waking body, midnight sketches of things I don’t quite remember. Most of this dream is shrouded in murky swirls and vague half-imaginings, one image fading into the next, indistinguishable unless actively focused on and sometimes not even then. And now I am getting another tattoo, adding two pirate-themed dioramas to my back and side. I don’t remember the tattooist or the pain of the needle, but the tattoo shop’s room was walled in sand-colored paint. Like dreams tend to do, I was then in a new place with no ready explanation or knowledge of how one scene bled into another. This place I had never seen before, and all of the details are nothing but blurry colors—burgundy, charcoal, mahogany— in the background. My dorm’s RA is managing a booth of dark wood paneling, wine glasses hanging from their bases from the ceiling. He washes a clear mug with a rag in his hands, over and over again, the dim light catching in his cherry-colored curly hair. The tattoo parlor didn’t give me the wrappings I needed to keep the raw flesh protected, so I approached my RA. I ask for the wrappings and he gives them to me for free, though I worry about pricing. But when I ask, he just says that he wants to see my new ink. I don’t want to take my shirt off in front of other people milling about in the periphery of this public space, but it doesn’t matter because I wake up.
Or maybe the dream shifts again.
I don’t remember the next bit.
“Write about a dream you have had. It could be a recurring dream, a vivid dream, or even a dream that you make up. Be sure to describe every detail that you can remember from your dream.”
ds106 Assignments: Dream It…Write It!
So this was a dream I had a few nights ago, or at least, a figment of a dream I had a few nights ago. I tend to dream a lot but have little to no memory of them besides the vague impression that I did indeed dream. It is a strange thing to not remember something, but know—feel—that it happened. But I thought it was very fun to try and describe the strangeness of dreams as it’s not easy, done very often, or much like real life at all. I tried my best to describe the potentially indescribable, or at least the usefulness of the sleep-world when so much of prose is about the wake-world. I definitely had fun and hope if nothing else it was an interesting read.
One of the many iconic parts of Bob Ross’s Joy Of Painting is his palette. He has very specific colors and knows how to use them in his art to make a cohesive product. Colors are something I wanted to try and focus on in this piece as this dream had a very particular pallet. But I also didn’t want to come out with the boring names of colors, does Bob Ross have boring names for colors? No. He has specific names for each shade and so that is part of what I tried to emulate.
