And the long spaces in between.
Some more pictures from where I grew up:
I have been having the most incredible dreams. Not mere abstract expositions or snatches of stories and pictures but dizzying and spectacular journeys. I've often had lucid dreams or starred in long, epic stories that seem impossible to fit into the course of a night's sleep but my dreams lately have been reaching a new intensity. I saw 300 yesterday and it was amazing. A rousing visual feast and easily one of the most breathtaking films I've ever seen. Yet, dare I say it felt small and hopelessly contrived compared to what I've been seeing each night?
Moments of deep and profound reflection that open like flowers and then ascend in a rush into soaring crescendos of lucidity that make me laugh and weep. I see, feel, taste, touch and smell. And I hear. Oh man do I hear. Some of the most incredible music I've ever experienced roars and pounds and illuminates the darkest corners of my dreams. It's a vicious irony I taste each time I awake, vibrating with ideas: my entire studio is sitting in a warehouse on the other side of the planet, waiting to be shipped to me.
I dream of my Dad, who is fighting through what the doctors say is the last few months of his life. In the dreams I realize, more clearly than ever, that all I want is to be able to love him without all of the baggage of our past before he dies. I have to go on long convoluted searches through dark and familiar buildings to find him - often in the basement, surrounded by pipes and steam and strange machinery.
I dream of animals, long dead, that were my closest companions as a child. They come to me sometimes angry, hungry but always still full of love. I feed them from kitchens piled high with feasts that have been barely touched. It is only now, as I lie awake in the dark - the sting of salt still drying on my face that it dawns on me they could have eaten without me. The kitchens are massive, ancient and overlook the most astonishing vistas. I desperately want to photograph them to show people. To prove that they exist.
Last night, as I often can in dreams, I was flying and indulging in extravagant acts of telekinesis. I looked out across a stunning landscape of clouds, crashing like oceans at my feet. The view was so intensely beautiful, vast and lonely that it terrified me.
The sun was rising or setting - or both - breaching the edge of the clouds like a child peeking from under a blanket but giving the game away with lurid sprays of gold and vermillion.
We are standing on the retina of some inconceivably giant beast.
The wind and cold spray was so powerful and the sky so vast that for the first time in memory, I was afraid to fly. But I did. Laughing despite (or possibly because of) knowing that I was surely going to die or be lost forever.
