Today marks my 200th Visual Dream Journal entry, which feels mildly absurd when I stop and think about it. Two hundred times now I have dragged fragments of the night back into daylight, scribbled them down before they evaporated, and fed them into a machine. Sometimes the machine hallucinates. Sometimes I hallucinate. Most of the time we are both making a suspicious mess of dream reality, and somewhere in that collision a strange new landscape appears. My dream world. A place I seem to spend a fair chunk of my existence, even if only one version of me is technically invited.
Dreaming has become one of the few remaining arenas where my brain is still allowed to roam off leash. No invoices. No work rosters. No petrol bills. No practical adult nonsense. Just raw bizarre theatre assembled by whatever half feral department runs the mind after midnight. In dreams there are impossible rooms, collapsing roads, giant animals, dead relatives, broken machinery, floating houses, old fears wearing new hats. It is one of the last places left where imagination is not expected to justify itself financially by close of business Friday.
So each morning I do what any sensible grown man would do. I document the madness in forensic detail and then attempt to reconstruct it through artificial intelligence.
This has left me wrestling for months with the increasingly tedious philosophical question of whether this counts as art or whether it is some mutant cousin standing outside art having a cigarette. Because on one hand it is my vision. These are my dreams, my symbolism, my strange interior cinema. On the other hand, it is not my hand pushing graphite for one hundred hours across hot press paper until my spine resembles a question mark and my tears become part of the wash.
There is still a part of me that romanticises that version of artistic suffering. The noble illustrator bent over the desk, sacrificing sleep, eyesight and lumbar discs in pursuit of beauty. Lovely image. Very poetic. Slight flaw in the business model though. Humans, in our infinite wisdom, decided that food, electricity and shelter all require money, which means I cannot spend one hundred hours hand rendering every dream that arrives nightly like some subconscious Amazon Prime subscription.
Even if I did attempt it, the maths becomes laughable. I would wake from one dream and have roughly sixteen conscious hours to complete an enormous museum grade illustration before collapsing unconscious and receiving the next surreal assignment from my idiot brain. It would be less of an art practice and more of a hostage situation.
So I have had to arrive at a less romantic but more useful conclusion.
Stuff it.
Artificial intelligence is here whether artists clutch pearls about it or not. It is not politely waiting outside until everyone feels emotionally ready. It has already kicked the door in and, naturally, artists are first in line because history loves using creative people as lab rats whenever a new machine appears. We are always the first cab off the rank to be told our skills are now inconveniently reproducible.
I understand the purist resistance. Truly I do. There is no replacing the deep bodily satisfaction of looking at a finished drawing and knowing every line came through your own hand, every mistake was yours, every success was earned in slow stubborn increments. AI does not give me that same sensation. I do not stand back and whisper, look at that, I am a master draftsman. Mostly I stand back and think, well that was a bizarre wrestling match with a robot, but we got there eventually.
Yet art has never been as cleanly handmade as people pretend. The mythology of the lone suffering genius is lovely for documentaries, but plenty of celebrated artists built factories, delegated labour, outsourced execution and used whatever systems were available to realise a vision larger than their own available hours. The hand is not the only organ involved in making art. Vision matters. Selection matters. Curation matters. Direction matters. Knowing what should exist before it exists matters.
And that is where this project lives.
My Visual Dream Journal is not me asking AI to be creative for me. It is me using a strange, unruly, often infuriating collaborator to excavate images I would otherwise never have the time, studio, budget or physical stamina to build. I do not have a full cinematic set department hidden in the shed. I do not have actors, props, lighting rigs, or unlimited days free to physically recreate every impossible scene my sleeping brain spits out. I have a keyboard, a machine, a memory and an itch to see these worlds made visible.
So yes, perhaps I am crying into a keyboard instead of crying into my watercolours.
Efficiency is not always romantic, but neither is creative suffocation.
If the choice is between using an imperfect new tool or having no outlet at all, I know which one I am taking. I refuse to spend my life sitting on a pile of visions because they do not meet somebody else’s approved purity standards. Purity has bankrupted enough artists already.
These two hundred entries are proof of something bigger than technology anyway. They are proof that the imagination is still alive under all the daily industrial debris. Proof that there is still play left in me. Proof that even in a world increasingly designed to turn humans into productive little wage insects, some wild internal cinema keeps projecting nonsense onto the walls at night and asking to be witnessed.
That feels worth honouring.
So whether this is art, anti art, proto art, machine assisted subconscious archaeology or just one middle aged man collaborating with a hallucinating toaster, I am claiming it.
Two hundred dreams in, and I am only getting started.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 