Sigmund dreams of the earth

Dumb air roars, the eras run, this mother with roots

under her tomb where (or when) one discovers wonders, covert. The move

from numb eros to true horror once drove Earth’s curse to roost,

an arid dew mirrored on these clovers that grew from error

to error, one discovers the truth.

Since childhood I have kept a record, spottier than I would like, of the more evocative fragments of those dreams that remain upon waking up — not with any particularly esoteric ambitions in mind, but simply because it has always seemed to me that spending 1 ⁄ 3 of my life in what amounts to a coma seems to me a pretty daunting proposition. It is a part of my life I want cultivate — or at least not instantly forget. And so, this song is part of an ongoing series of works, poetic and musical, exploring these splintered impressions.

Drawing on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, I wanted to see what would happen if I were to repurpose the psychoanalytic concepts of parapraxis, displacement, and condensation as poetic devices — to move from psychoanalysis to psychosynthesis. I began by taking a famous bon mot commonly attributed to Freud, “from error to error one discovers the truth”, and distorted and embellished it through a series of Freudian slips so that, e.g., “from error” becomes ”dumb air roars”, “one discovers” becomes “wonders, covert”...and so on.

These warpings and wendings were then channeled into surreal images from my dreams. Whenever the song repeats lines from the poem, it produces quasi-“misheard lyrics” (“this mother with roots” becomes “this mother withdrew”, etc.), layering one stratum of dissimulation on top of another. The music exploits the rhythmic complexity in the text by mirroring it on large and small scales through a series of modulations to various tempos.