Dreambox
A few years back I was visiting a friend in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece. She told me she had been a sleepwalker since childhood and still was, and went on to describe how she locks her apartment door every night — obviously it's dangerous to walk out in the streets asleep and she's done it quite a few times; friends or relatives have told her stories about running after her and calmly, without waking her up, guiding her back to her place safe. But when she is home alone she can never be sure that she did not go out and come back — and that’s scary. Almost every morning she finds some object misplaced or some other clue that she had been walking round her house asleep.
She explained that it is practically impossible to trick herself, since there is no way to hide the key before she goes to bed some place she won't find it if she happens to sleepwalk. Of course, if she did manage to hide the key from herself at night, she wouldn't be able to find it when she woke up in the morning to go to work.
The other day I was reading something about the Self and the Other; well, my friend is both — we all are, but in her case this is true in an absurd first-level way.
I’ve always been fascinated by the two worlds — Sleep and Wake. Which is which? How can we tell for certain? Which part is (more) “real” and which is “dream”? How can I be sure that right now I am writing this and not dreaming about writing this? How can you be sure you are not dreaming about reading this? How do I know that I won’t wake up as, say, a 20 year old woman in China or in South Africa or in Alaska, who saw a weird dream of being a 49 year old man from Greece who likes to take distorted photographs through blue ashtrays? Marcus Aurelius wrote that “life is a dream” (όναρ ο βίος). Edgar Allan Poe took it further: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream”.
Some time before my trip to Thessaloniki, I happened to find online and listen to the audio file of a lecture by William Burroughs. It was on dreams and reality. One phrase struck me: "The idea that dreams are completely illogical off course is not true at all". I used the above phrase with Burroughs’ voice among other audio samples in a musical piece / sound collage I wrote. I named it “Dreams” (2007). In another audio sample I used in the beginning of “Dreams” we hear the voice of a female student telling William Burroughs that she once solved some algebra equations in her sleep — she woke up, solved them again and the solution was correct. There is also a definition of the term “dream” by computer voice:
A dream is the experience of envisioned images, sounds, or other sensations during sleep. It occurs in humans, most mammals, and some birds. The events of dreams are often impossible or unlikely to occur in physical reality, and are usually outside the control of the dreamer. The exception is lucid dreaming, in which dreamers realize that they are dreaming, and are sometimes capable of changing their oneiric reality and controlling various aspects of the dream, in which the suspension of disbelief is often broken. Dreamers may experience strong emotions while dreaming. Frightening or upsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares.
I guess that talking to my friend about her sleepwalking brought all these thoughts to the surface. Because, in a sleepwalker’s case, we have an interesting overlap of the two worlds: my friend sort of moves bodily out of the one and into the other — there are witnesses and hard evidence of these “trips”.
Anyway, the morning after talking with my friend about all this, I took some photos of her balcony from the inside, through a deep blue ash tray, which gives a natural cyan toning and slightly distorts the image. The world out seen from the world within through a coloured and distorting transparent object. After a few days, I combined these images, added the William Burroughs phrase: "The idea that dreams are completely illogical off course is not true at all" and printed the whole thing on duratrans, which I sandwiched between two sheets of plexiglass, and made a lightbox. I gave it as a gift to my sleepwalking friend (Dreambox I).
The title (Dreambox) came naturally. The -box part obviously has to do with the term "lightbox" (that's what it is, a black box with a neon light inside and the artwork on one side, printed on semi-transparent material) but I suppose it's also a reference to the Phil Lesh / Grateful Dead song "Box of rain" and Robert Hunter's lyrics: "it's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago".
A couple of years later, during another visit to my friend, I took some more photos of the same view of the balcony, using the same blue ashtray. I added a ghostly female form, copied from another photo from my project: Visions of a city: tribute to Larry Jordan. I combined the images again and added a few verses from an old Apache song: "In beauty may I walk, in silence may I walk" in order to make a second lightbox (Dreambox II), which I never did, as far as I know.
