Dream Cards

Isa Donelli's Dream Cards are the other half of a pairing the archive reviewed together: Luigi Di Giammarino illustrated both this deck and the Tarot of Metamorphosis, and the two share a poetics, metamorphosis for transformation, dreams for the unconscious, one artist's hand working adjacent nocturnal territories. The Dream Cards take the sleep side: imagery built for dreamwork, the unconscious mind's symbolism dealt into cards meant to sit beside the journal on the nightstand. Dream decks have a specific honest use that distinguishes them from divination: not predicting, but furnishing, giving the dreamer a vocabulary of images that seed recall and pattern-recognition, which is established dreamwork practice wearing card form. Di Giammarino's soft surreal style suits the brief exactly. It suits dream-journal keepers, readers working the unconscious deliberately, admirers of Italian fantastic illustration, and owners of the Metamorphosis completing the pair. Readers who want their cards to interpret the day rather than the night have the rest of the catalog.