What Does It Mean When You Dream of a Man in a Mammoth Costume Drinking Tea?

It’s Day 87 of my visual dream journal, and “Mammoth Man” arrived unannounced from the subconscious fog, a scene too peculiar to ignore, too poignant to fully explain.

I didn’t draw this piece by hand. I used AI to recreate the surreal theatre of my dreams. I see it like an illustration plucked from the pages of an old gothic novel, mysterious and textured, as if it’s always existed somewhere deep in the shadows of a second-hand bookstore.

But what is Mammoth Man? Is he just a man in a mammoth costume, taking a break between performances? Or is he something more, an exhausted performer embodying the extinction he’s slowly dancing toward? In that sense, Mammoth Man feels like a metaphor for us: modern humans putting on a brave show while the world tilts into the unknown.

That’s what I love most about capturing my dreams. There’s an untapped well of ideas in dream journaling that’s both wildly unpredictable and deeply revealing. Whether the images are nonsensical, symbolic, or eerily cinematic, they are stories from another version of me, a nightly remix of conscious thoughts, buried memories, and raw emotion. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and it’s one of the richest creative sources I know.

Using AI to interpret and reconstruct these dreams feels like a natural extension of that process. Just as dreams blur the lines between conscious and unconscious, AI merges what I’ve seen with what I haven’t, turning fragments into fully realised visual poetry. It’s a kind of collaboration between myself and the machine—a dreamy collaboration. Come to think of it, that feels oddly similar to the way dreams themselves operate: chaotic inputs mashed into meaning.

That crossover between dream logic and machine logic raises the question: are we ourselves AI-like? Constantly stitching together perceptions, memories, feelings, and fears into a working version of reality? Sometimes I wonder if we’re living in a collective alt-reality, one giant simulation powered by a billion individual dream engines.

“Mammoth Man” won’t be printed or hung. I’m considering keeping all of these pieces intangible, stored on the blockchain a digital archive of my invisible dream life. A novel made of vapor. Un-touchable, un-explainable. Just like dreams. Just like life, really.

So here’s to Day 87. To Mammoth Man. To the weirdness, the storytelling, and the fact that sometimes the most meaningful thing you can do is remember the things you forgot while you were sleeping.