Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Illustration Friday - Dreams


The topic this week for Illustration Friday was "Dreams". I started racking my brain for an idea and it didn't take me long to come up with one. For years I had dreams where I could fly. And they always gave me a really great feeling when I flew, which must be what Superman feels. It's a feeling of complete freedom. It's been 5 years since I've had a dream like that. But I think that maybe it's because of the strange and kind of scary thing that happened with the last one.

I was busy with school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and living on the 9th floor of a 10 story apartment building with my 2 roommates. My room, if you could call it a room (Technically I lived in the dinning room) was connected to the kitchen and the living room. Off of the living room was our balcony, other bedroom and bathroom. Soon after I fell asleep one night I began to have a very vivid dream. In my dream I woke up from sleep to find it a bright sunny day. I walked to the living room, opened the sliding glass door, and stepped outside to the edge of the balcony, gripped the railing and pushed off into flight. I flew around downtown pittsburgh, dodging buildings and swooping under bridges. I even saw someone else flying around, but damned if I couldn't catch him (he had a rocket pack on his back). After giving up on catching him, and flying around for what seemed like many more hours I started to get cold and decided it was time to go back home. So I flew back to the North Side, found my apartment building and landed back on my 9th floor balcony grabbing the hand rail as my feet touched down. Still feeling cold, I started to feel the pull of reality and began to wake up. Something was wrong, instead of feeling the warmth from my blankets I was still feeling a bit chilly. Which was strange. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see that I must have still been dreaming because I was still on the balcony, but instead of a bright blue sky there was a hazy black one. As I stood there and realized that I wasn't dreaming, I noticed I was still gripping the handrail and felt that I was leaning slightly over the rail. At that point I got really freaked out, because I had apparently sleep walked right out onto the balcony in the middle of the night and almost leaped to my death. I realized how much it would suck if I woke up from my dream and was falling to my death. It took me a few day to get over it, and it took me almost a year before I told anyone what I had almost done. How weird is that?

Anyhow, have a great week, your comments are welcome as always.

5 comments:

vfm4 said...

that's an awesome, creepy story.. made me actually shiver...

very nice drawing though..

carla said...

Wow! That must have been really traumatic! I love the drawing though...it definitely has that Superman quality to it, soaring high avove the buildings...great perspective. I think you need to make that dream work for you metaphorically...you know, instead of actually trying fly, have it send you to greater heights in your life or career, etc. Thanks for sharing that with us.

Ellen said...

Nice illo...love the perspective!

bee'nme said...

This was a riveting story...thanks for sharing! And your illustration is just great...love the perspective.

Julie Oakley said...

Fascinating story. I really like the precision and composition of all of your illustrations