The Dream Architects

Growing up, I spent most of my time drawing.

As soon as I could hold a crayon, I drew cars and portraits of my family and friends. I sketched animals I dreamed of having one day in magical lands of adventure that sprawled out into gigantic imagined maps on other planets. Countless hours of my childhood were spent in my room examining the visual details of album covers and graphic novels, then attempting to create my own. When we went to Italy in the summer, I visited the local museum in every city we traveled to and studied the old masters up close.

My friends were either the guys who played football like me, or the other geeks who liked to draw in class. But my real best friend was always my big brother. Ours was the only reliable relationship I had when I was growing up because we never stayed in one place for long. We lived a vagabond kind of lifestyle, moving every so often. This might sound more exotic than it was. Ours wasn't a hippie life on the road with surfing and psychedelic parents. It was the tidy young academics' version of life.

My mom was a straight-A student from Italy with very old-fashioned parents who'd lived through both World Wars. She fell in love with a quiet Swedish student when they both attended an international summer camp in Romania for highly talented adolescents. My parents married and had three kids—two boys, and my little sister.

We moved to California when I was two, back to Sweden when I was three, to Tanzania when I was five, and then back to Sweden again when I was seven. And somehow, we still managed to spend most of our summers in Sardinia, in a little town on the north coast called Santa Teresa di Gallura.

When I was nine, my parents divorced, and from then on we stayed in Sweden. By that time I'd already decided that the most important part of my life was the dream world I was creating in my drawings. It was a peaceful place, and, opposed to other parts of my life, it was consistent and safe, and I had control of it. I could spend hours just letting the pen travel across the paper, slowly shaping places where epic adventures played out in front of my eyes. I never knew where the stories were heading when I began; I just followed along, and it was as exciting to me as if someone else were reading me a fairy tale. Every time we moved, I left my drawings behind like a trail of fading memories and started a new collection.

As an increasingly quiet kid caught up in my dreamworlds, I became hard to reach. But inside, I understood well the difference between a beautiful fantasy and a real-life challenge. I was never as dreamy as people imagined me to be. Not then, not now.

The things I experienced might have seemed like distant fantasies to others, especially in gray, serene Sweden, but the green mamba in the climbing tree behind our house in Tanzania was real, not a fictional monster in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. My brother and I almost got killed by the mamba. We carefully climbed down while the venomous snake leered at us. We ran for help, and the village elder summoned an albino man called the Snake Killer. I watched as he defeated the mamba in a chaotic process involving a brick tied to the end of a long stick.

Another time, when I fell asleep on the deck of a fisherman's boat in the waters between Corsica and Sardinia, I was vaguely cognizant that it looked like a scene from a Tintin book, but it wasn't. It was my reality. I remember the warmth of the Mediterranean sun in a summer that never seemed to end, and I can still hear the heavy tuk-tuk-tuk from the diesel engine. During the day at the beach, my brother and I built magnificent sand velodromes that rivaled castles.

The stories my grandfather never told me or anyone about the hell he'd lived through in World War I were not part of some abstract homework assignment. I'd watch his eyes from a meter away, shifting as he avoided his memories from the trenches; the fear he never acknowledged, the sorrow he felt for his lost friends, the pride of his accomplishments in the face of death. A fading diploma from the last Italian king hung on a wall in his sunlit apartment in Torino. This was no imaginary king from a Tolkien book. The proof was there, right in front of me, and I could almost touch the paper with the king's elaborate autograph behind the glass frame. After my grandfather's death, my Italian relatives found a diary that confirmed what we'd always guessed; World War I was truly hell. The old man had been there and come back with scars that stayed with him for life.

Neither was it a dream when I visited my dad's university and operated an unforgiving moon-landing simulator on a giant IBM computer that took up an entire room. Nor when I discovered that my Swedish grandparents' cellar was filled to the brim with original paintings and prints from my great-grandfather, who'd been a conservative painter. He'd lived during the most artistically liberating times but was reluctant to participate in them. He kept painting incredibly skillful photo-realistic landscapes, while all of Europe's art scene was on fire with modernism, futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism. He was certainly aware of these revolutions, and I couldn't help but wonder what made him choose to ignore them. Maybe he thought the major art movements were just temporary, overhyped gimmicks, like Nintendo Wiis?

I've lived my life with a mirage of California etched into my brain. A pale image of a place far, far away that quietly calls my name, trying to lure me to come home. The dry hills with pine trees, the Case Study Houses, and the skateboarders in Palo Alto. The smell of American asphalt after rainfall. I know them so well. Except…it's not really a mirage, it's a memory. It's where I learned to speak. I didn't dream any of this.

In Sweden, it rains a lot, and it's not warm. The streets don't ever dry up, they just remain damp and cold, and the air is filled with an earthy aroma of wet leaves, stone, grass, and mud. In California, though, the rains are short and the streets are wide. The sun will quickly boil the patches of water into steam, and there's a crisp feeling in the air.

I've never stopped knowing that the world is bigger and more exciting than what we see in front of us. I've always felt that dreams are not a product of the unreal, but more like suggestions of alternate realities that can become real if we want them to. In fact, I knew as I was growing up that the world really is out there, waiting for us to show up one day. Those faraway mythical lands exist.

Once my parents divorced, I tried to adjust to my new reality, but I was too young to properly digest the collapsing family structure, and the emotions I felt were merely distant clouds moving across the sky on a cold winter day. If I was aching for a stable home before, the longing got worse, and I retreated inward to safe places of fantasy.

The new friends I was drawn to were always the outliers, the odd and the different. One was the heir of a little-known Swedish noble family who had turned communist and smoked a whole lot of dope. To the frustration of our teachers at school, he'd never remove his tam-o'-shanter, a Scottish bonnet, and he'd fiercely lecture people about the name and spelling of it. He was extremely intelligent but more angry than clever, and consequently his youth was wasted picking all the wrong fights. Nonetheless, he had a big impact on me; he was the first one who suggested I become a professional artist. It was a revolutionary thought, but once the words had been spoken out loud, I never forgot them.

Another friend came from Scotland, where he'd grown up in the Outer Hebrides with four siblings and parents who wanted to escape modern society. He came to Sweden alone with his mother when his parents split up. He used to talk to ghosts in my wardrobe, and once he threatened to kill me with an ax and bury me under the ice of a small pond in a frozen field. He was and still is one of the people I trust most in the world. We formed an incredibly strong alliance around our melancholy, our lost connection to remote places, the guilt we felt for our lonely mothers, our mutual interest in drawing, and our longing for our fathers, who lived far away.

In high school, my life was warped again when my childhood friends and I all went to different schools. It was a horrible time. I just wanted school to end and to live my own life. I hated my classmates and I hated my teachers. My few friends were musicians and weirdos, and we wrote very sad, angsty songs, and we always dressed in black. We were serious, pretentious smokers and liked talking about suicide. We never got invited to any parties.

Eventually I befriended many aspiring artists, writers, and musicians, but not a single gamer. The circles I moved in seemed to consist of people from academic families, where culture was more important than technology. There was no one in my sphere who considered games a hobby, let alone a potential profession. However, even though we didn't think of ourselves as gamers, mostly because the term hadn't been properly coined, my brother and I designed board games together. We created several elaborate, complex, and slow-to-play pen-and-paper games. The biggest pleasure, apart from all the illustration tasks that fell upon me, was diving into the algorithmic structure behind the games. There is an almost musical beauty in creating hidden mathematical rules that give way to a long adventure.

My brother grew up and became a cool rock-and-roll guitarist, and I remained the mysterious, quiet, artsy guy in the shadows. Drawing was my thing during my entire childhood. As high school came to a close, it seemed only right that I apply to art school and just keep going. After all, what were the alternatives? I couldn't think of any at all.

I got accepted to Konstfack in Stockholm, where I studied graphic design and illustration. Wonderful Konstfack! A school in the Bauhaus tradition. Hidden in a giant concrete building, looking so serious and pretentious, the school was filled with the most fantastic circus of young aspiring artists and craftspeople. The place smelled like paint and melting silver.

I loved it for so many reasons, including that it was the first time I'd felt at home anywhere, and it was the first time I'd fully enjoyed the company of my classmates.

After taking my master's degree, I started up a tiny one-man company and made a living as an illustrator working on comic books, graphic novels, and advertisements.

It seems so incredibly obvious now, but what I didn't understand even remotely back then was that my art was never meant to be for sale. Without exception, all my drawing and painting had its origin in the highly private; they had been created as parallel realities through which I could escape. Painting was perhaps the only thing that had unfailingly been my own. I couldn't sell that, and I was beginning to discover that I didn't want to.

For a while I plowed on with my company. I worked for no money making comics, and I worked for good money selling illustrations to weekly and monthly magazines. Occasionally, I'd get a gig for a tech start-up, which was even better money, but at the same time very confusing, since I hadn't initially paid much attention to the digital world.

The longer I kept going, the more I hated myself. It was as if another person had taken the liberty of selling my most personal assets, and not even for a good price. I felt cheap and dirty, and I stopped pitching for new work entirely. I didn't want illustration assignments anymore; business was killing the most precious thing I had. Of course, the heroic act of not going to sales meetings slowly put me in a financial bind, and eventually I had to take other jobs.

Originally, none of those other jobs mattered to me. They were my rebound relationships. I was just buying time until I could figure out what to do with my painting. My real mission in life was to repair my relationship with art, but I didn't know how. I still painted in my spare time, but without direction. The magic was gone, and I knew just who had destroyed it. I tried to apologize to my younger self for my incredible clumsiness, but of course the space-time continuum doesn't work that way.

I quit painting entirely. The next time I picked up a brush was on a computer screen.