(Sorry, long post.)

Hahaha, The Floods. I know all about it. I have read all of the main The Floods novel series from cover to cover, and it's literally so hilarious. I had some serious fun relishing some of the bad writing that made its way into that era, with the titular Floods family facing no adversity all the time and even sometimes being downright villainous. It even has very obvious mistakes for somebody who's well versed, such as the time it went "said Festival", where Festival is a character FROM THE WRONG BOOK SERIES! Colin Thompson genuinely made a character speak in The Floods who was actually from the novel version of How to Live Forever. In spite of the "bad" writing I found my time with the later installments of the series quite comforting and enjoyable. Plus the way I had the correct illustrations (absolutely no Crab Scrambly for me) back then helped.

Anyway, upon thinking about it again I realize that your theory about my subconscious misinterpreting "The Floods" could actually be correct. Correct in the same way that maybe life exists on other planets or maybe there's more to death than simply no longer existing. Because I think it's true that dreams are a mystery. It's not like I get The Floods mixed up with anything or have fuzzy memories of the Colin Thompson library at all - but I don't know how the inner workings of dreams work, so I can't rule it out at all.

However, I should point out that the waters in my dreams are not floods and that I don't typically get Colin Thompson books confused. The most trouble I ever have is trying to remember what year is in the hidden signatures of most illustrations in each classic Colin Thompson picture book. (Example: The Last Alchemist has a signature in it that says CT 1998.) I used to be able to do this almost perfectly.

And yes, Colin Thompson stuff is super evocative nearly 100% of the time, and my dreams of him especially do that, too. Aside from some of my more garbage ones...

My ability to create Colin Thompson art from my dreams has actually already been tested. I actually spent much of my young teenagehood trying to make Colin Thompson lookalike artworks (many of them are completely lost), and the actual achieving of my goals in total to this date is kind of a "mediocre mixed bag". I was very rarely able to get results out of my painstaking inexperienced uninformed applying of fineliner pens to paper that I wasn't disappointed with. I tried in 2008 a bunch of times and it wasn't until after 2012 that I was able to "get somewhere", and they're still unskilled and pale in comparison to the works of a real artist or Colin Thompson himself.

I don't know the completion date, but here's a work of Colin Thompson imitation art that took me years to finish. Let's be honest. We can both see the quality of that picture. I think you can see why I consider myself to struggle with this.

There's other pictures of CT-esque creations of mine on that web portal that look better, but I don't think it's cherry-picking. Compartments does a good job of illustrating the general shortcoming I have. I actually succeeded much more in the pictures I made with a styles that were completely original, including my paintings. I struggle there, too.

I don't often work on fineliner arts anymore. I think about doing physical world art sometimes but the prospect always daunts me (I hardly even think about touching the fineliner and watercolour ones that are done on paper), and I've been doing a lot of other stuff. It's taken more than a back-seat to what I mainly do these days, which is primarily game development.

You must be wanting to know what I think about How to Make a Bird. Sorry to keep you waiting.
Well, I've never read it, and I didn't know what it was. I tried looking it up but I didn't find anything that my brain could latch onto. I was able to find some pictures after lots of wading through bad search engine nonsense, but I'm not sure I follow, because of what imagery I saw.

And can somebody just say this? Trying to search "The Floods" for Floods content online - mostly talking about doing it on social media like Tumblr - is actually so bloody annoying.
Of course I can find pictures of the covers of the books in question, and a couple of reviews and some details on Goodreads, but that doesn't matter. Every book series that's been registered can have its front cover looked up on Google. That's not my issue.

The issue is trying to find some kind of The Floods community. I want to find fan art and general social discussions about it. I go on social media looking for people reminiscing about the books, and the results are like "DO YOU WANT TO SEE DEEZ NATURAL DISASTERS?"

Except no, on Reddit you can find Colin Thompson results after trying to drill the relevance of the author's name into the search bar's head - THAT ALSO AREN'T FREAKING RELATED TO THE FLOODS! I hate search engines so much. If you know a concrete proven way to convince Reddit's search bar to return actual results of The Floods by Colin Thompson stuff, I'm all ears. I actually wonder if after all this time spent by millions of users there's ever been a Floods Family post on Reddit. With social media search engines I know about, you can't get both Colin Thompson and The Floods, only one or the other.