leader of the starry skies

I have a couple of recurring dream themes lately. The most major one is that I've just returned to art school and I'm about to start a new year - usually I've returned to the places I used to live while I was there, either the halls of residence or the flat I used to share with friends. They're still there, and have been the whole time, living their lives. It's always a little grungy as it is when you're a student, but nonetheless lively and I'm always excited to see them again and to be back in school. I've had this dream at least three times now, perhaps more. It's a pretty clear reflection of my desires to be involved in an artistic community again, to live freely and independently, to have direction and projects to work on and support systems to turn to. I'm working on building that for myself again. It's just hard, even for people who don't have the health issues that I do, but this year I finally began to feel like it was possible for me to achieve again eventually.

The other recurring theme is related in that it's mostly just about my social needs. In it I'm usually close friends and spending time with someone "famous", or maybe more accurately, currently outside of my current sphere of connections. I put it that way because one of them is a fairly successful musician who I won't name for privacy reasons but I was on friendly terms with him some years ago, we used to chat online and at his gigs when I could make it to them, we were even on hugging terms, haha... at one point he asked me to do a photoshoot with him (at the time I did photography of various things including music and had photographed a few of his live shows) but it didn't work out. I don't have any contact with him any more but we had a lot in common. The other person, slightly more amusingly is Toby Fox, who I have never spoken to, but in a similar way, I feel like we could have been friends and he's a bit of a missed connection - I used to visit the same forums as him years ago, pre-Undertale, and have a couple of degrees of separation from knowing him, but we never actually interacted.

It's all about feeling a need to connect to other people who share my interests in a unique way, who are also creatives. My current social circle is small and although a lot of them are artists and I don't mean to sound ungrateful for them, I don't often feel properly understood by them. I always feel like a bit of an outsider even within groups of outsiders. Basically, I'm yearning for connections with people who would "get" me and what I want to do as an artist, and naturally that feeling manifests in subconsciously focusing on people whose work I identify with and whose personalities I'm familiar enough with, albeit from a slight distance, to feel like we'd get along. It doesn't need to be who I'm dreaming about in particular, but they're a representative shortcut for people who check those boxes for me.