I’ve debated whether to share this collage. My favorite part of blogging is how it gets me to examine things more closely. Because making the collage accomplished what I love about the process, I decided to tell about it.
For one thing, when I look at the finished collage, I’m reminded of the feelings of the dream. In addition, it brought a payload of discoveries along the way.
In the dream, I climbed a steep Afghan road alone. This photo, taken by a Filipino boatman on my lone travels in the Philippines, puts me there on that lonely road in the Afghan mountains, a place I’ve never been other than in a dream.
Real pay dirt (so to speak!) came when I hunted through hundreds of National Geographics for a feeling of a Middle Eastern work yard. I found about ten scenes that fit and what were they all doing? Making bricks! That’s the kind of discovery one can make in drawing or collaging a dream.
The collage illustrates the parts of my dream; I follow an Englishman up another steep road. He sits in a saddle of the mountain and tells me about his life there.
I descend again and enter a workshop. This image is from two different sources but produces perfectly the shadowy quality of that dream moment, with suffuse light raying in. This woman becomes a focal point of the collage, an emergent Middle Eastern (heretofore unknown?) female offering me the name, Knightsbridge, echoing the saddle I had just climbed to with my English masculine self.
For me, dream work looks backward and forward. This dream gave me a sense of a seminal moment, when I was deciding to enter into a publishing co-op. It held the moment up and brought it gravitas. Looking back, it was a pivotal moment. I think I knew my intent more unconsciously than consciously. Thus, the dream. It started me on a momentous year of remaking, with further editing, new covers, and audio book making. The additional unforeseen benefit has been reacquainting me with all my stories in order to better craft subsequent books in the series.
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Marie Judson 