“You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.” [Woodrow Wilson]
Twilight is all that is uncertain, blurred and painted in secret colours. Lying in bed, half asleep, half awake, there is still time before the alarm rings and I doze into crazy thoughts. Not exactly dreaming because I’m not really asleep, though images and parts of sentences, fractions of strange melodies, keep me from choosing sides – fall back into unconsciousness, or wake up to a new day.
It is a very particular and often rather unpleasant type of sleeplessness. This is the time when things which trouble my mind while awake transform into surreal images. Little worries become daunting fears and random words repeat in my head like a poisonous mantra.
At other times, this is when I feel creativity crawling up my spine. I am a big believer in this ancient myth: an artist wakes up in the midst of night, turns on a dim light (or lights a candle), picks up a notebook (always there for such noble moments) – rushes to quickly rescue an epiphany from the deadly hands of forgetfulness. Because it does happen – images, harmonies, words and ideas do come to us in these lonely moments, as we walk a path through twilight and into the broadening day. Which is why I usually try to embrace this mental-physical state for as long as possible, even when it scares.
This, for example, is a result of what I call a Pink Moon Zone:
“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams” [Salvador Dali]
Dali is one of the most known examples of an artist who was constantly inspired by his own dreams – his famous melting clocks express the arbitrary way in which we conceive time while dreaming. On an earlier post on this blog I mentioned McCartney’s dreamed melody Yesterday which became one of the most loved songs of the Beatles. In 2015 the neo-classical composer Max Richter released an album titled Sleep, eight hours in length. His music invites us to listen to it over a good night’s sleep. The album premiered as a live broadcast in front of a few lucky people who were given beds to sleep in. Max Richter says about the piece:
“Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live“
When I was 6 or 7 years old, our librarian at school read to us the Epic of Gilgamesh, once a week for one hour. She read a part out loud and then guided us into a fascinating First-Graders discussions about one of the most profound works in the history of literature. Dreams are a core subjects in this work. She asked us one day: “what do you think dreams are?” I answered that dreams might be memories we have from earlier life cycles.
I don’t know about life cycles anymore, but I still often have the feeling that my dreams are blurred memories… but maybe they are their to remind of something that didn’t yet happen?
