And dreams should stay in dreamspace, for that’s where they belong. Mainly cos a dream remembered is a dream that has only half done its work. And the cosmos is made up of stuff the scientists can’t find. Most of it is dream matter – a product that fuses language and music, iration and realisation, past and present, up and down, war and non-war, everything and everything else, and more, into one synaesthesic ball of luminous gloop. Everything* participates. Why does your heart as well as your gut feel music when music is only auditory – just chimp 1.2 banging skins and strumming wires? Because there’s no such thing as playing music: the music plays you. All the successful musician does – in the final analysis – is mediate smudged echoes of the moment of creation and maybe the moment under the moment too. They are listening for the ghost of a chance. They may help us make sense of who we are and where we came from; and as a compassionate side effect, teach us that nothing is lost. So I rake the sky, I listen hard. I trawl the megahertz.
And one night in 2013 a dream half did its work, remembered it on awakening in the middle of the night. The visuals have longsince turned to cosmotic/dreamcosmotic dust but the main theme of it was entirely word based. A repeated phrase that meant nothing to me. It went „Zeta Reticuli knows“, I don’t know how many times. I Say ‚remembered it‘ but the riff was still bouncing around my cerebral cortex – I could still feel it. I picked up my phone and sent myself an SMS so I could remember this meaningless phrase in the morning: „zetaretikuly knows“. Went back to sleep. Typed the nonsense phrase into Google the next day. And it turns out, with the help of search engine semantic/syntax correction, that Zeta Reticuli is real. Why it had got buried under a bush in the boondocks of the subconscious is not for me to conjecture. But hey, Zeta Reticuli knows – for it is written in light on a speck of lighter lighter light in the synaesthesic oblate globe of luminous silly putty that 90% of the cosmos comprises of. Somewhere.
And last week I dreamt I saw the cover of Marillion’s record Misplaced Childhood on a post written in pixels within the everchanging wider set of pixels on Manafonistas. And I dreamt I listened to the whole thing over again. Ich brauche eine bestimmte Energie, um diese Schallplatte zu hören. & this was all I needed. &:
And I looked out the window
And I saw a magpie in the rainbow, the rain had gone
What the record offers is a nexus: the place where the dreamers of the dream meet the morning at the window, where The Incredible String Band, Boards of Canada and your own warblings make sense. The cup is broken. And everything is broken. And everything is repairable.
*Even stone.
[Note: 12.35% of this text is copyright Paddy McAloon, 2003. The rest is copyright: the universe]