Thursday, March 4, 2010

Dream weaving


Butterfly: "Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name."  The Last Unicorn

I was thinking about a story I wrote for a class in elementary school.  The assignment was to write a story and illustrate it and I wrote mine about a dream I had about two men who were in charge of the dream world.  One was very old and one was young. The younger one was named Schmendrick because in my dream he looked like the silly magician from my favorite movie at the time, The Last Unicorn.  During the day while we were awake, the two men would knit a large sack which they would fill with the sand from their garden and it would turn into dream dust at night.  When night fell, they would travel around the world and sprinkle dream dust over every sleeping person and then go back to their little cottage and begin knitting a new dream sack.  As they knit, they would be so tired and weary from their journey that they would unknowingly skip stitches or make little mistakes.  They didn't know it but every particle of dream dust that touched these mistakes would turn into bad dreams and nightmares.

That is all I remember about the story.  This says a few things about me...I was a strange child and had a wacko imagination...yikes!  This was probably around the time when my aunt was teaching me how to knit.  It must have been, because I really had a hard time with it and I suppose that my knitting struggles were actually causing me weird dreams instead of bad ones!  : )  Anyway,  I have now come to find that the nuances that happen when I am doing something which requires repetition of an action tells a story.  The thing I am working on becomes a continuous recording of my current emotion or thought and I believe that is what gives something handmade its character and makes it beautiful. 

I was thinking about all of this because after years of searching, I found that Peter S. Beagle (the author of  The Last Unicorn) just narrated and released his book on audio!  I can't wait to listen to the book I have read countless times growing up and one whose images combined with the animation from the movie, formed the basis for my artistic aesthetic! : )  Yes, I am a dork!

1 comment:

  1. I think its a wonderful story. I always have weird dreams, but I like it!

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