Ceremony of sleep – ideas for a dreaming body.

No one needs to live this life – Garbidge Dreams, Tjook 1984

For P. and other artistic hermits in affluent societies.  Tjook – Christmas 1990. 

…as some innocent thoughts of possible comfort for the lonely and their sentiments in the dark days that end another year, and that also, as a metaphor, could be an idea for a film, a fairy-tale, a dream, an escape, a lullaby or even a lifetime.

“I only need a bed and time to sleep and dream”.

In my starting period as an artist, I often tried to escape depressed periods of artistic despair. My quest to change the led into pure gold did quite often not materialize.  I often found my self lost in the infernos of the burden of the task. So I try to escape by sleeping and dreaming, hoping to wake up in a world where there’s a wanting to live and not only a longing to sleep and to dream-like in this world. I felt like this weakness was my really my strongness, for I did not really care for reality and I was sure my existence did not matter all that much either. Så many hours during the night, the mornings or the afternoons, I lay on my bed in a kind of suspended state, an eternal meditation, like a baby in a womb, unaware of time and the separation between being and reality.

Nowadays a life can easily be lived in bed and in dreams or, in fact, like most people do, in front of a screen in some other virtual reality. I even heard a reactionary artist that proclaims that one is free to choose the age one would like to live in, just like he chose to do himself.  I think this time is time enough and I like to think one can choose the state one wants to live in, rather than the time. And I think that people who do otherwise are not really much happier. In fact, I like to assume they are quite like me. I only draw the consequence of what is also tiring them. That is why I, as a young artist, in periods I often slept between 10 and twelve hours and I was surely not the only one I suppose. In the time between sleeping and awakening, I dreamt lucidly or lay quietly with my eyes closed and played and thought of a world in which I really would like to wake up. Some scientists, I heard on the radio, concluded that long sleepers live shorter. You see, I sensed that there also was a practical purpose to it.

Here is one of possible dreams, a wish-dream so to say.

I really liked the idea of lying in a kind off burial state, not completely dead, just a little ‘dead’, embedded in flowers, the hands folded, the eyes closed, with a vague content smile around the lips, relaxed like a dreaming corps, but in fact as a dreaming body.

Next to me, there would have to be a transistor radio or a podcast channel with a permanent program on culture, philosophy and the state of the world. All professionals doing their best to fully inform the awareness of the dreaming body about the actual state of the world and its rapid changes. Only the brain would absorb all the information and play with it or just listen or dream it. Or in another dream I would slowly float down a river in a coffin in the form of a guitar, my legs stretched in the neck, my torso in the guitar body, just floating down a stream listening to the wind and waters surrounding me. Sending my thoughts and dreams to my followers from the universe of concurrent virtual existences with a webcam with GPS mounted over my head.

For as time is never right or wrong, I like to slide through seemingly timeless spaces and become a wonderful fruit of life and death; to survive like a corps is to survive without any movement at all.

 

Transcendence

“Death to me is like a big hole that I’m trying to fill with something I can go to when I die! A big f… hole that has to be filled, every day and every time this task reminds me I exist; a forever unfulfilled grave: my life is my funeral”