An account

Morning of August 22, 2015. Saturday. Yet again, I am back in my childhood home in <PERSON>. The setting, though, is more near the entrance into the kitchen, though still in the living room area. For whatever reason, there is a character present who seems to be a version of actor <PERSON>, who starred in the first movie my wife <PERSON> and I ever saw together in a theater before we we married ("Shadowlands", about <PERSON>). He remains mostly standing near the entrance to the hallway and talking to me about how good an artist I am and the aspects of what I am working on at the time. This does not trigger lucidity in any way. I am seated at a table, making some sort of large drawing with just a few felt pens, yet still get the impression it is related to a painting - or maybe it will become a painting eventually. I make a statement a bit later of how I wish I had more of a variety of colors to work with. The more the actor comments positively on my work, the more I seem to absentmindedly start adding random lines and what may eventually eliminate the original image. The image seems to be an ambiguous scene, seemingly as seen from a window, but with both winter (as there is seemingly sparse snow) and summer features. There is a bird (unknown species) near the upper middle of the image as well as trees and a sunrise or sunset. Its wings are out as if in flight, though I think it may also be on a branch at one point, as the image changes over time. There is an unusual nature to my work at one point. I try to focus on it and even "explain" it to the actor (and my wife who is present) before I wake. The concept makes no sense at all, though. It is something like including an additional layer over the image as someone else has also painted or drawn the same scene (elsewhere) but slightly smaller, or something like me making the picture as if someone else were drawing it as a "reflection" into my drawing. (It is hard to explain, as it does not make much clearer sense in my dream, either, though I suppose it could also be related as my image being on an easel within the actual scene but the easel being transparent and showing the scene more realistically through the outline of my less-formed artistic version.) Although my image was seemingly very well-done in the first part of my dream, I am adding lines (wider apart) over previous lines, removing the more defined nature of the image, supposedly superimposing the art of someone different over my own version. I am starting to think that <PERSON> will become annoyed with what I am doing (in "ruining" my original work), but he has not commented at this later point. All in all, this may simply be yet another metaphor for the waking process; that is, my dream becoming less-defined as I am waking even though my dream-self is attempting to clarify or change the dream's energies somehow. During my work in the mid-1980s, I found that many dreams can be seen in this manner, especially flying dreams, which represent the state of dreaming itself.