Dreamland Revisited

If anyone is interested, this is just a little explanation of the drawing I added to my blog and part of which is my current default photo.


As with all good crazy people, my story involves both my mother and my childhood. When I was little I had a lot of bad dreams. Terrible horrible no good very bad dreams, nearly every night. I still do, just with a mere fraction of the frequency (although the horror and morbidity has certainly matured). But when I was just a wee thing, my sainted mother taught me that more often than not, I could be in control of my dreams, partly by thinking of lovely things as I was falling asleep, in addition to making myself aware I was only dreaming and since it was my own mind, I could make it anything I wanted to. (Did I have a choice but to become an artist with that sort of wide-open creative encouragement, come to think of it?)


Anyway, we would play a little game at bedtime where my mom would say something like, "I'll see you in Dreamland... I'll be wearing a pink dress with white polka-dots and butterfly wings and a lime green tiara. I'll meet you at the gum-drop tree. How will I know you?" And I would describe in great detail my dreamself and her attire. It was never quite the same from one night to the next, but my mom nearly always wore pink with white polka-dots in some form or another, and I was always one for tu-tus. Sometimes I was a mermaid swimming in a purple sea, sometimes some sort of winged creature but it was a delightful little tradition and it did the trick.

From time to time in my adulthood we have talked about it, and once at a family gathering when my nephew was telling us about his bad dream I engaged the whole extended family in a very elaborate Dreamland reunion which sort of unlocked a lot of really wonderful memories for me of whispered fairytales and enchanted dream meetings with my Mommy, the person who taught me what love and beauty and magic were.


So for Mother's day, I did this little drawing for my mom, of our grown-up(ish) idea of how we'd look in dreamland. Of course, in our dreams we're both seven feet tall and weigh about ninety pounds, but what I think its really about is how we'd look if we looked on the outside like we feel on the inside. I guess that means I'm a fairy-CanCan dancer with an affinity for Jane Austen, horn-rimmed glasses, pearls and tattoos (I'm a complicated creature) and my mom is femininity personified, the queen bee and a nurturer of all living things, an angel in an apron with whom I share my sense of whimsy and my love of beauty.


Now the other women in my life want in on this so I'm embarking on another trip to Dreamland to capture a glimpse of how they see themselves... it should be enlightening. Hope you like it, but mostly it was a labor of love and the target audience was my mother who is admittedly easy to please, so if you don't, well, I just don't care. That's what Mom's are for.