Work in progress..
Oil on Canvas 36” x 36”
Sleep is another country. A mysterious, sub-terrain where the blessed vanish till light. As a child I was puzzled to know why we sleep. With ‘progress’ we have left so much behind, yet we cannot evade our essential, primal need to die nightly to be reborn.
What happens? Where do we go? As someone often not invited into the sanctuary of sleep, I’ve seen some things. Trippy things.
In the netherworld of waking dreaming the ache of sleeplessness has tormented me with cruelly beautiful hallucinations. As vividly coloured orbs dance violently on the screens of my eyelids, piercing strains of varying intensity accompany a kaleidoscopic light show.
These deliria occur in a state well past exhaustion, as I’ve passed through levels of consciousness and been teased entry to a place of restful bliss. As the phosphine agitation rises to a fever pitch I’m able to observe my awareness of impending sleep, bringing me back up to the surface, yearning unfulfilled.
Denied respite beneath the veil of slumber, remaining at the threshold, it’s but slight grace to have known the awe and fervour of hypnagogia, the borderland of waking/sleeping.
Direct, oblique, athwart, circuitous. Remembered, imagined, sensed. Romantic, dread-filled. In the gallery titled HYPNOGOGIA I’ve made a feeble attempt to collect some of the odd and fanciful sensations visited on many of us, en route to the plunge below the surface that separates wakefulness and slumber.