dream material

I recently stumbled upon Fellini's "The Book of Dreams". For anyone who hasn't seen this book, it is something! It inspired me to be more conscious of my dreams, to keep a better dream journal and try to tap into the huge amount of creative material there. I've never worked to use dream imagery in a concrete way as Fellini did in his films, and his sketches showed me new, and perhaps more useful and concrete ways, to record dreams. To create imagery out of dreams rather than to write about them presents a new way of dealing with dream material- instead of simply transcribing a dream, the imagery goes through a second creation when it is drawn down.
While looking at the book I remembered my dream from the night before: I was holding a small baby that my dad had put in my care. We were watching a movie and I forgot about the baby. I let her slip onto the floor. My father came back and was very angry because the baby had a high fever and had worsened. "It's going to die anyway", I said. "You have to pay attention and keep checking her. You can't just let her go". There are so many images and meanings and stories in dreams that flash by and are gone.
On one page of Fellini's book was a giant woman that struck me as being incredible similar to N.C Wyeth's painting The Giant, which my mother particularly loves (she is a pyschotherapist). How exciting to find images that repeat, change and grow: where do the images originate, how do they come to us, and in what form are they reincarnated through our unconscious into new life?