International Association for the Study of Dreams 2004 Psiberdreaming Gallery

Note that when you click on the links for the sounds your browser will try to stream them. Since my server is slow you will have better luck RIGHT CLICKING them and choosing "SAVE TARGET AS" and saving them to your desktop or wherever you choose. Then you may open and play the files with your regular MP3 player without interruption.

The notes are A - C - D - A. The octave ignites the pilot-light of the third eye, an arbitrary distance between frequencies but soothing as junk for addicts of Western music. Stressing an octave is almost like rhyme, the notes seem to imitate one another. Balinese musicians tune their instruments in an almost opposite way in order to get the most jangle, the most beating between the frequencies, and the maximum tension of avoiding the octave altogether. They also tend to bang the bejeezus out of lots of Heavy Metal. Hardcore synesthetes, obviously. You might be just able to make out that I used a distorted photograph of a landscape for the colors between the C and the D, the two notes clustered together between the octaves, to suggest the window in the melody.

We tend to think of natural sounds as being more chaotic, more random than music, which is actually as absurd as a powdered wig. If you had never seen water before and heard something making this sound, do you think you'd guess that it was made by something transparent that seeps into your socks and makes your toes cold? Either something really amazing happened 300 billion years ago or water is easily amused, but it's never stopped cheering and applauding.

My sampling banks are full of hits: string hits, brass hits, orchestral hits, simultaneous collisions of multiple instruments on a single beat, in this case the final downbeat of a song by the rock band Nirvana. A sudden group of sounds, as applied out of context, bursts forth, perpendicular, flashing light into a parallel world of surfaces which reflect back a million tiny, distorted, colored and texturized copies of itself, all glimpsed and then gone at the speed of chemical light. Mandelbrot did not invent, he discovered the fractal, one of those simple rules lurking everywhere that make the fabric of reality sparkle.

Most percussion sounds look remarkably like the thing that makes them. Splash cymbals leave brassy wakes of concentric circles, tambourines glitter like flocks of crazy silver coins skipping across the water, thermal conga hand prints bring a photosynthetic blush to the translucent hide of rhythmic surface tension. In Borneo they wade into the river and play it like a log drum with cupped hands which somehow reminds me that all rhythm is a variation of the heartbeat. Most modern music is interested in replacing the organic pulse with an electronic gate, staccato timeframes into which anything may be injected. It's like an obsession with Chinese food. Anything can be percussive if you chop it fine enough.

In the Tarot, the swords represent the powers of air, and if you ever been impaled by an unexpected car horn you know why. But brass instruments have a bubbly sense of humor about themselves, like old Cadillac fins, and the sharper their wit the more they giggle. But then most sounds are too complex to see the same way twice.

Buckminster Fuller discovered the geodesic dome in a moment of synesthesia and quickly realized that he could have gone the long way around and consciously adapted the geometry of the fly's eye or thousands of other teleological examples, but it didn't happen that way. I wish I knew half of what my brain knows about geometry. It always seems superficially counterintuitive that the faster a sequence repeats, or spins, the more it can seem to graduate toward inertia, seem to be standing still, or even produce enantiodromia, the illusion that its spokes are actually moving backward. In any case it is we who move, sometimes in more than one direction at a time.

Yes has always been one of my favorite bands, with titles such as Relayer, Soundchaser, Tales From Topographic Oceans and Wonderous Stories they even package themselves as music for synesthetes. Wearing headphones in the dark, I'd frequently open one eye to make sure the light in my head wasn't casting shadows in the room. They have a rare, hypervisual quality that can run circles around the best Bach and Mozart, that kind of music which research has shown can make us temporarily smarter. Becoming temporarily smarter seems to be the function of synesthesia, in fact I'm convinced we could barely navigate through physical reality if we were not all synesthetes at some fundamental level.

Hey Toto! Are we zooming in or zooming out? Eventually in these little sacred journies you get the Ourobourian impression that it makes no difference either way. At certain atomic levels things begin to look interstellar again. The process of evolution caricatures itself six billion times a nanosecond, want to see it again from a different angle Mr. Spielberg? I'll never forget my friend J., who had a literal spiritual awakening listening to this song, and opened her eyes wide as if from a deep sleep, looked at me and said "I finally see what you're seeing!" I just smiled and said "of course you do."

"Master of Images, songs cast a light on You
Hark through dark ties that tunnel us out of sane existence
In challenge as direct as eyes see young stars assemble

Master of Light, All Pure Chance
As exists cross-divided in all-encircling mode
Oh Closely Guided Plan, awaken in our heart

Master of Soul, set to touch all-impenetrable youth
Ask away, that thought be contact
With all that's clear
Be honest with yourself
There's no doubt, no doubt

Master of Time, setting sail over all of our lands
And as we look forever closer
Shall we now bid farewell?
Farewell"