This was my first piece for The Sleepover Society, an ongoing collaborative art project with friends. We each have varied styles and media when it comes to creating art, and each month or so we decide a theme and come up with a piece on that theme. Our first ever theme, on June 2016, was Sleep.
"The Dream Harvester went to his field to check on his crops, and while most of the dreams are ready to be harvested, he finds that there are a few who aren’t even asleep yet!
This is what I came up with when I thought of the theme, ‘Sleep.’ I thought about how when we sleep, we dream, and how dreams sometimes feel like reality. It made me think about where our dreams come from, why we experience them and what they are for.
It then led me to remember The Matrix movie; the part where we discover that everyone was merely living in a dream, and in reality the human race was nothing more than a power source for the machines. People were merely things to be harvested. This then led me to think, ‘what if we are being harvested?’ But instead of our bodies, it was our dreams.
That led me to the concept of the Dream Harvester. He’s this big cosmic being who farms our dreams. We are merely his crops, planted in his field. He waits for us to sleep, waits for us to dream and when he finds them ripe enough, takes them. What he does with his harvest we don’t know, but perhaps this is the reason why sometimes when we wake up we can’t remember our dreams.
And then there are the crows. What are they? Maybe they keep us from sleeping and they’re the reason we can’t sleep at night? Or perhaps they’re the Dream Harvesters helpers, making for a faster dream harvest? Or perhaps they take the dreams for themselves? We don’t know.
That’s how I ended up drawing this scene. I ran with my imagination for a bit, and I have more questions than before I started. But it was fun experience thinking about it and being able to put it down on paper. And who knows, I might be on to something."
- Caption from The Sleepover Society
