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I literally had a dream last night that Hlynka was unbanned.
In general I’ve never found dreams to be particularly interesting, my own or anyone else’s, and I’ve always been puzzled over why they held such fascination for certain thinkers like Freud. Usually their contents are either nonsensical, or they’re connected to waking events/thoughts in a relatively straightforward way.
Have you had any interesting dreams lately? What do you think about dreams in general?
Well, I dreamt that the $45 I spent on 10 months supply of Ozempic for my mom was actually a permanent $4500 a month commitment I couldn't break without her developing liver failure and dying. Relatively straight forward as dreams go, I've already gritted my teeth and prepared to hand over a chunk of my liver (and a rather high risk of dying) if she developed full blown cirrhosis.
Thankfully, Hlynka has yet to haunt my dreams. I'd classify what you saw as a nightmare.
I've always been rather annoyed that my dreams are so low resolution and blurry, and I've yet to have a lucid one. Just imagine the graphics, I could save so much on an RTX 5090! Who needs full immersion VR?
I know my brain is holding out on me. My art skills peaked at the age of 5, despite my mom being a talented artist, yet when I was halfway to dying with a fever of 105° F as a child, I had vivid photorealistic hallucinations in 3D. It just won't bother until I'm literally cooking in my own heat.
I'd give so much to have a single lucid dream, they sound like a ton of fun.
As for the actual importance of dreams, I consider them to be somewhere between offline training and garbage collection going on in the brain when we're unconscious. No particular greater significance.
Although there are unsurprisingly some highly talented artists who report having hyperphantasia, it's not a requirement. Glen Keane famously had aphantasia. My impression from watching professional artists work is that most of them simply have an average capacity for mental visualization.
The majority of learning how to draw just comes down to acquiring cached patterns and learning how to modify and combine them through trial and error, same as any other skill. It doesn't depend on any special faculties.
I spent about 7 or 8 years of my life undergoing personalized drawing and art lessons by a tutor. Other than an attempt to molest me, nothing came of it. To be fair, he wasn't very good at his job.
I'm sure you can improve to some degree with practise, but I am relatively confident that innate talent is indispensable if you want to become a "good" artist, or at least one that people want to look at, or even to the point of getting ten hearts on DeviantArt or Twitter.
Frankly, I disagree strongly with the final conclusion:
You cannot arbitrarily improve skill with effort, and even guidance and feedback. I'm unsure why this isn't as obvious to you as it is me, but just look at chess, music, sports and so on. Success in many fields is absolutely gated behind intelligence and fine motor skills, and more abstruse talents.
If I had to point to myself, writing absolutely comes naturally to me, and that was obvious at an early age. I've certainly improved with millions of words written, but there are bounds and the asymptote becomes obvious in most cases. Most people certainly become better writers from the period they learn the alphabet, but practice only takes you so far, and usually not to the point you're lauded as a good writer.
In the particular case of art, aphantasic people still have spatial skills. I dimly recall they're mildly disadvantaged as shape-rotators, but evidently not to the extent they can't draw at all. After all, it would be obvious if they couldn't write, or perform any other task that you might (possibly erroneously) assume that you need some kind of visual memory, even if they don't have a "mind's eye" as per usual.
Most artists I've encountered draw from reference photos or reality most of the time, not from memory or imagination, so visual memory doesn't come up all that much. But then I mostly follow more traditional naturalist artists, not sci-fi or fantasy ones.
Personally, my painting and drawing skills are alright, while my visual memory and imagination are quite weak. On the other hand, it actually is important in art to Notice, which is partially involuntary. I attended a cloud painting workshop a couple of months ago, my painting was decent, and to this day every time I see a cloud, I involuntarily evaluate the lighting conditions, shape, visual density, and warm and cool tones in the clouds in my field of vision. This is annoying! I don't like it! I tried teaching it, and 9/10 children just made up a cloud from imagination, despite having a window and a stack of reference photos, but I probably could have insisted we all start drawing the same one or something, and corrected them if it had been important.
Most people are able to learn to draw if they're motivated enough to be willing to stare at a bunch of different things until they see, not the thing, but the values of the thing, the negative spaces, the shapes, the light, and so on -- but plenty of people don't actually want to do that, it's kind of annoying to look at a flower and see a bunch of shapes and values. Most people resist staring at a single thing for three hours, and are therefore not much good at visual art; it's probably related to natural wiring. I'm curious to see whether I can teach my daughter to draw and paint, since she's way more hyper than me, but likes art and craft things. I'm thinking probably when she's 12, but have given up on the Polgar method of art teaching with her.
Artists working on things like games/comics/animation/etc will of course use as much reference as they can. But you can't expect to have a perfect reference for every conceivable thing you might need to draw. A strong ability to improvise is required too.
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