2012 (Size: 30" x 20")

Death on the installment plan, sleep is that nightly reminder of how we lack control over this human shell and all the electrical impulses charging through it when we're not entirely behind the wheel. A time to reset and recharge, a time to dream of the glorious and the grotesque. Upon waking, dreams range from kind to cruel and resonate with one not at all, or for minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years. Perhaps the recesses of sleep are really a "Twilight Zone" playground of sorts between the living and the almost unliving.

 

"Now, blessings light on him that first invented sleep!  It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot.  It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.'" -- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)

"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body.  It rarely sets the soul at rest.  The repose of the night does not belong to us.  It is not the possession of our being.  Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.  In the morning we must sweep out the shadows." -- Gaston Bachelard

"The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.” -- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

"Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever." -- Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project

"Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths." -- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

"Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.” -- Stephen King