This is a discussion mainly aimed at other dreamers who are primarily visual artists in waking life, though anyone's thoughts on this are welcome.

This is only one of many times this has happened; today I've had a semi-vivid non-lucid dream where there is some art which is very perfectly portrayed and detailed. The amount of detail is fantastic in the dream, and even now awake I can remember some of the details with accuracy. The shading in particular was the best part. At first I thought the artwork was mine, as the signature resembled one of mine, but on closer inspection it changed into a string of numbers.

My thoughts whenever I have this sort of dream are the kind that make me ask myself: how or why is it that my mind, at least when I'm asleep and dreaming, can in some part have the capacity to create a highly detailed piece of artwork that does not even exist in waking life? A completely original piece of artwork with a highly detailed composition and excellent shading...

And now, if I tried to recreate that piece of art, or some of the artwork I've seen and made in other dreams, I wouldn't be able to get to the same level of detail without first getting a lot of reference imagery, then making many different sketches based on what felt right for the composition and then moving on to finally start trying to paint it in detail.

Even my waking capacity for visual imagination is terribly limited, compared to the detail the dream-mind achieves, and I am not advanced enough as an artist to be able to achieve some of the detail present in dream artwork without pouring far too much time into a single piece. In the dream, the artwork is pretty much instantly there with seemingly no effort, and in reality, the same piece would take me many hours to get right, especially at the conceptual stage of its creation.

The main questions I can think of to start off discussion:

  • Have you ever had any such dreams? Either lucid or non-lucid, really.
  • In waking life, were you able to accurately recreate some, or all, of the detail you saw?
  • Got any thoughts on what could possibly help the waking imagination reach the same level of focus and vividness as the dream-mind's capability?
  • Have you ever painted or created some art in a lucid dream, and what was that like?