Dreams in Motion

For years, I had a recurring dream. I would find myself flipping through old photographs, scenes from childhood, fragments of home, but they never stayed still. Each image, though captured on ordinary paper, would move in subtle, hypnotic ways. A swing might sway in the wind, a hand might brush a strand of hair from a forehead, a smile might unfold slowly across a face. It was as if memory itself refused to be pinned down, as if the photographs were alive, carrying their moments forward just beneath the surface.

This dream came long before technology dared to imagine such a thing. Before AI could animate a frozen face, coax a blink from a still gaze, or make time breathe again inside the borders of a frame.

Now, the world edges closer to that imagined landscape. Today, images no longer sit passively. They twitch, shimmer, breathe. They bloom.

One piece from my Fragmented series became part of this exploration. It is a composite photograph where human limbs seem to dissolve into nature, where flowers sprout from skin and reach toward unseen light. The original photo had unexpected beginnings. Beckett, my daughter’s friend, who was thirteen at the time, had asked if I could take some photos. Those images, playful and spontaneous, later wove their way into the fabric of this series, becoming something layered, transformed, and a little surreal.

When I submitted the image to AI, I was curious, maybe a little wary, about what would happen.

The result was strangely fitting. Without understanding or feeling, the machine made the flowers bloom. It took the suggestion written into the photograph and made it literal: petals unfurled, stems lengthened, the impossible garden deepened. There was a strange poetry to it, as if the machine had picked up on some silent wish embedded in the original and carried it a few steps further into being.

Yet there is an uneasiness too. Watching a machine breathe life into something so personal is like hearing your own thoughts echoed back in a voice that is not quite yours. It raises difficult questions about authorship, about authenticity, about the delicate line between creation and imitation.

There is much more to say about this tension, about what it means for human-made art to be mirrored, reimagined, or even completed by artificial hands. About what is gained, and what might be lost. But for now, I am sitting with the strange, quiet beauty of it: a photograph that once lived only in my dreams, now blooming into something unexpected, somewhere between memory, machine, and mystery.