A Year of Dreaming
We begin in the waking world, which humanity insists on calling the real world, as if your dreams have no effect on the choice you make.
These are the opening lines to the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, an adaptation I have been waiting for with equal parts hope and dread for over half my life. I was 17 when I found The Sandman in Mega City Comics. Mega City has been on Inverness Street in Camden for as long as I can remember. I had visited it regularly, alone, without buying anything, since I was 10. I knew I liked comics, but it was a vague knowing based on a childhood love for Spiderman and X-Men cartoons. The shop had shelves upon shelves, and boxes upon boxes of choices but everything was sealed away inside archival bags. I didn’t know how to choose without asking questions and I was too shy to ask the intimidatingly cool staff for help. Still, I returned, weekend after weekend, trying to touch something just out of reach.
I don’t know what was different the day I finally bought something. I remember picking up Mike Carey’s Lucifer and turning it over to read the blurb, only to see the words: ‘from the pages of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.’ I remember thinking that if Lucifer was a spin off, I should start with the origins. That thought, and Dave McKeen’s incredible cover, was all it took to break through 7 years of longing. I bought Preludes and Nocturnes, Volume One of The Sandman, and took it home to read. Within days I returned to buy the nine other volumes in the series.
Buying The Sandman turned out to be one of the best choices I ever made. It introduced me to The Endless, a group of powerful, god like siblings who are the anthropomorphic personifications of Dream, Death, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction and Delirium. It introduced me to comic books without Superhero’s, a genre I didn’t know existed and love to this day. Above all else, it introduced me to Neil Gaiman, who quickly became and has remained my favourite living author.
Dream is a hugely complex character. He is powerful, prideful, caring, spiteful, fragile, arrogant, pouty, unsure, loving, unforgiving, generous, immovable, and changeable. He is, in short, the embodiment of dreams themselves, such powerful and contradictory things. I have loved him since the first pages of Preludes and Nocturnes, a love born in part because I recognised the shapes of my own dreams in the characterisation of this Dream Lord.
Today A Nomadic Rose turns one. I have been writing to you for a year. When I began it was with a fragile dream: that there might be people interested in what I do, in my art and van build. Over the last 12 months that dream has become a reality. You are here, in increasing numbers, reading what I write, joining my journey. For that I want to offer a deeply heartfelt thank you. Thank you for finding A Nomadic Rose and thank you for subscribing. It makes a world of difference.
Today’s anniversary seemed the perfect moment for reflection. I want to enrich A Nomadic Rose for us all, and so I have made some changes to the subscriptions. From now on-
Free subscription now gets you:
A Weekly Letter, direct to your inbox, in which I share personal stories from inside my life as an artist, my van conversion, my travels, and more…
Join in the conversation through comments and likes.
Paid subscription now gets you:
A Weekly Letter, direct to your inbox, in which I share personal stories from inside my life as an artist, my van conversion, my travels, and more…
Photo from the Archives - a monthly photograph from my archives along with the story behind it.
Adventures in the Kitchen - a monthly recipe as I share my discoveries and inventions in the kitchen, and explore food from my travels.
And Other Stories - irregular and exclusive stories shared only with paid subscribers.
Join in the conversation through comments and likes.
There is also the option to become a Founding Member for £60, which gets you:
Everything paid subscribers get plus…
Twice a year you will receive something special in the post. It could be a postcard, something from my adventures, published highlights from the newsletter or something else entirely.
Reflecting on A Nomadic Rose hasn’t only been about changing what I offer or how I offer it. It has also been a process of reflecting on why I dared to have this dream in the first place. When I began A Nomadic Rose it was with the hope that this letter could become part of my creative and economic landscape, one of the outlets and inputs that enables me to make art. That I would have a space and audience with whom to share thoughts, to test ideas, to write. And that in return that space and those people would provide a portion of my income.
It is a beautiful dream, and one I hold onto every day. I know what I need to do, and can only hope it will continue to work.
The Sandman starts with Dream captured by a magician in 1916. He is held, locked away inside a glass globe set within magical wards, for a century. During that time his realm, The Dreaming, crumbles, the dreams and nightmares he created abandon their functions and begin to pray on the waking world, and millions of people around the globe come down with the ‘sleepy sickness’. Some dreamers are unable to wake up and leave their dreams, whiles others cannot fall asleep so no longer dream at all. Without Dream to govern it all, dreaming becomes dangerous, unbalanced, unsustainable.
It is the perfect metaphor. Dreaming is a fragile thing and dreams must be tended to, cared for, fed. But one must also be careful not to live stuck in one’s dreams. The power lies in knowing which dreams we can make real and which we can’t. A lot of dreaming is about waiting, a lot of it is about building, and all of it about believing. A Nomadic Rose, my art, and my van are part of an interlinked dream, one I can make real with hard work, action, and the joy of writing to you all. I look forward to continuing to the journey, to growing even more, and to dreaming even bigger. After all, dreams are Endless, and Dream himself is there to help build them.