Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy (76) American Dream - American 梦

 

The Chinese character in the artwork 

is character Dream of shell bone script.

The right one is Bed, the left one is a person who is dreaming on the bed. Why are the person and the bed vertical? Were ancient Chinese slept vertically? No, they slept horizontally as we do.

Because ancient Chinese used bamboo slips to write/draw the characters, the slip is very narrow, about 8 mm wide, difficult to write/draw the character horizontally, they wrote/drew the character vertically. There are some this kind characters which are in vertical, e.g. Bed, Horse, Dog, Pig, Tiger, etc.