Alchemy, a formula of dreams

Alchemy. Transmuting lead to gold; transmuting the physical to the spiritual. I have always been fascinated by the history and principles of Alchemy which can be discussed for years! The illustrations of alchemy books and manuscripts are fabulous, too; a nice place to start your journey is the 84th Chapter of The History of Graphic Design, a great online source (seems great in general, not only for the Alchemy chapter!).

The image in this post, started as a fractal I made in JWildFire. I put it through several passes of neural processing in the Deep Dream Generator, delving deeper into the dream until shapes of animals started to appear and blend in; then, in the same web-service, I applied several styles and got something that reminded me of the alchemical writings of old. With a lot of symbolism and coding, it's a map showing the steps to make a flask of pure glowing "gold."

This is the original fractal after the "neural processing" but before applying the "alchemy" style.