Although this image doesn't look like much, it took a lot of work to make it. It is a hard record of three days of intense struggle. Ultimately it took up so much of my life and made me so uncomfortable (for reasons I don't understand) that I felt the urgent need to get it over with and post something. This is evidence to me that the process of dream illustration is definitely magical and producing serious results, even if it's messy and as-yet inconclusive. From my notes: Driving south along a "northwest" coast. Gray-blue tones everywhere. Road stretching in front of me, I can see mountains clearly. Waking up, some hallucinatory images of reefs over the oceans, scenes of myself writing that the reefs are 8 feet high. I had a hypnogogic state when I woke up. Some kind of heart-shaped reef that was going to be frightening because it was so real and so large. I struggled for two days to illustrate a figure driving in a car. It seemed like a simple thing to do at first but I found I had to make challenging decisions about it, much deeper than the subject of the picture. What character did I want to represent me? What should his clothes represent? Should I continue with the symbolic language I'd developed in other pictures? What did the various answers to these and other questions say about me? And the biggest surprise was that I had to think about what I was driving toward. In the scene I just saw mountains. But in the act of depiction I had to ask what ultimately I wanted from dream alchemy. I don't have an answer but to represent the process I included two ships that were great symbols of good an evil from the waking dreamlife of my youth -- The Enterprise of Star Trek and Darth Vader's ship, the Executor. I don't know how what lies at the end of this alchemical journey, but in this simple, incomplete picture I have a concrete record of three days of intense struggle to resolve major issues. The emotional urgency is very rewarding.