About a year ago I bought something that I had a dream about not so long before that. I usually don’t remember much from my dreams, but this time I woke up right after day-dreaming about how I am creating a tarot deck entirely from live, natural photographs. It felt to me then something that is quite different and fresh, something that nobody actually did, mainly because I haven’t personally encountered any purely photographic tarot decks till then.
When I stumbled upon the Somnia tarot, some time towards the end of the previous year, I immediately felt like it’s something that I was meant to have, even before I went through the pictures of the cards themselves. That’s despite promising myself to not buy any new decks anymore in the coming future, because I supposedly had enough (a promise I keep making to myself till this day, not very successfully).
I remember that I was quite mesmerized by the photos of the deck at first. They weren’t exactly what I would have expected in my imagination a photographic tarot deck to be. There was a sense of eeriness about them, sometimes a certain degree of gloominess, and some divergence from the pure classical RWS imagery and symbolism, but not too much. Also, because the creator of the deck, Nicolas Bruno, is a professional creative photographer, the imagery strongly reflected a creatively artistic approach to tarot and photography in general. That makes the cards into quite obvious works of art, fit for an art gallery exhibition in every way.
The striking atmosphere in this deck is influenced by what Nicolas attested to as his own experience in dealing with chronic insomnia and troubled sleep. The cards images do seem like they are taken from, or inspired by actual dreams, characterized by psychological depth and sometimes struggle and even depression. And here is where the new version, the upgraded deck that I received a couple of weeks ago from supporting the Kickstarter for this, differs from the original one. in my mind, besides the physical differences of smaller, standard size and the golden edging and writing etc., the atmosphere in the new version is noticeably less gloomy and depressing, if I might say, and this is thanks to the enhancing and enriching of the colors of basically the same images.
In this new delicious version the works of art that are the images of the deck are getting an injection of vividness, aliveness and in some cases more intensity and what one might call a flow of new blood. They seem even more striking than the originals, and at the same time there’s a bit less of a sense of depression about them. It’s as if the dreams they are taken from are more optimistic, convey more self-confidence and have more richness about them, while still maintaining the atmosphere of psychological depth and a degree of seriousness and even struggle.
I do enjoy working with the new version, it has it’s gravitas – something that cannot be said about a lot of the decks out there, IMHO. It stands out, in my mind, by being both technically unique – entirely consisting of real life photography of staged scenes in nature with real people (all with hidden faces in one way or another, which adds to the mystique of the deck, IMO) – and also by being artistically unique, by reflecting a real, authentic psychological struggle and coping with emotional challenges, of some kind or another. In short, there’s a seriousness about it, and one should take it and treat it that way.