My subconscious is trying to help me. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm sitting at a drafting table for drawing, and my subconscious is talking to me. It's a disembodied, god-like voice that says, "We need to do what we can to help her." (By this, the subconscious is referring to waking, conscious me.) The me at the draft board agrees. 

"What about this?" asks the disembodied voice. 

Then the me at the drawing table gasps as the disembodied subconscious gives her a blurry alien to draw. And she immediately realizes that she'll (I'll) have to learn to think completely differently if she's going to figure out how to draw this effectively. 

INTERPRETATION

I was in the middle of drawing a portrait for the first time in perhaps a decade when I had this dream, and there were many points at which I realized that I needed to think of the visual information totally differently in order to create some way to represent it with pencil. 

I took art classes in high school, and I remember one section that would talk about creating different textures for things like trees or rocks using different pen strokes, and using different sort of tricks like making the background lighter and less detailed in order to create the impression of distance. These sorts of things seemed important at many points in the creation of my portrait, because simply looking at the reference images wasn't enough to get a good result. I had to draw what I knew, rather than what I saw, and that required thinking differently about the visual information. 

I think it's helpful in broadly applicable ways to come up with ways to think of things differently like this.