Diving into my mind.

Do you work in architecture or have a construction hobby of some sort? I did hear about something called a "memory palace" and what you describe sounds similar.

My dreams tend to be centered on things or events rather than the setting. Or maybe I just do not pay attention to my surroundings when I am asleep? (shrugs)

Actually, yes; I've been doing quite a few experiences with myself about dreams since last year or so, like that one when you try to "control" the environment in there and get rid of nightmares when you want to, by doing certain things while inside; it was pretty funny at the beginning to be honest.

I've been making a dream journal for like a year; at the beginning, I just ran to write up what I could remember, it was mostly one these random dreams; within time, these got more and more interesting and deep, these dreams with strange stories that seemed like long movies actually happened, they were extremely detailed, but I can only count like four or five per year; when I was like 12, I once had a dream of a maid, locked inside a seventieth century house, a simple house made out of stone, with a living room with ripped out red curtains, with pines outside, a cloudy night environment, inside a dark room with only a candle on the wall; I just saw her in there, then jumped to her running from the house towards the woods, and digging herself a hole to jump inside.

Extremely weird and nonsense, but it had an incredibly nice amount of details that I was amazed back then; they stayed at that frequency for years, until these experiences I've talked about on the main post.

As for those results out of these things I've been doing, one of them actually turned out to be true after I read somewhere that you can dream about something specific if you focus on it before sleeping; I've tried it with a project I had to do for university, kept drawing and thinking about it for two days, and one night I had an awesome dream about it, the whole drawing being converted to an environment, with all the objects, people and a specific situation happening in there, and these have been working for the other projects next to them.

God, even my nightmares seem to have changed and are interesting, perhaps because I had lost many of the fears that I had many years ago. Such as the fear of bleeding and vomit. I used to feel desperate and hide myself when I heard someone vomit for absolutely no reason, I've always tried to think about it, to understand it but it didn't seem to work, the same goes to the others; they just got away since some time, I've got more used to blood and stopped caring that much about others (maybe the reason of that fear to exist was that I was extremely worried and paranoid about health of the ones close to me); I dunno, it just seems more natural than frightening now.

I still have random nightmares, but they seem to be less powerful now. I guess the biggest change is that most of my recent dreams have nothing to do with me anymore, even if the situation is scary or terrifying, I don't feel anything inside because I feel like I'm just watching those things happen; I've had a nightmare on Monday, extremely detailed like the others and it did exactly feel like that.

I've watched myself as a kid, alongside other kids in a rainy day heading to a place that seemed like a school of some sort, an enormous and tall wooden stairway, it was pretty dirty and the building had many windows over that way, there were like three or four doors on the bottom, and one at the top. I then jump to inside that room and there's some strange decoration in there, red paintings on the wall, trees, some weird objects and plants, then I jump to another scene where the kids are playing and one of them steps on the floor and explodes by a bomb, then a huge fire starts and I see myself trapped inside that higher room, then I fall from there and wake up; strangely, I didn't actually feel bad anytime during that dream.

I'm actually amazed with that change and how "long" these dreams seem to be, by that I mean that sometimes I tend to oversleep just too much until someone wakes me up, I've gotten to sleep more than 14 hours without feeling anything different once, for someone that had a really bad sleeping problem, that's just too damn weird.

I just can't decide if I'm more scared or amazed by these changes. :S

Did these dreams start happening around the same time your pictures got more and more grotesque?

Hah, I don't even keep a record of when these started, I've always had a thing for grotesque stuff on art since much longer, I just didn't ever try to make it happen until like a year ago. Speaking of that, you now make me remember of a presentation I had to do for school once, it was about the concept and example of parody, all groups had the same subject. I had the examples part as for graphic arts, and I brought a parody of that Boticelli painting (The Birth of Venus, naked woman on shell and pomegranate), I brought a parody of the same canvas, with a fat man instead of the woman, naked with a pink towel on his pubes, instead of the beach background it was a dirty laundry with weird clothes and objects, instead of the shell it was a pink bowl with dirty water and other creepy crap over the picture.

The teacher actually liked it saying that it was a very distant parody, yet interesting compared to the other "normal" examples by other people, but I can't really say that my classmates were a little comfortable with that painting being on a gigantic projector in front of them. Now that I think about this, it makes me feel stupid. lol.