In his Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant asks ”whether dreams might not be a purposive arrangement made by nature [because] if no such force moved us inwardly […] sleep would even in a healthy person probably be a complete extinction of life.”* Sleep without any cognitive activity can indeed equal death. While this fact might seem obvious, it also serves to tell us that dreams are a necessity of nature and reality.
A daydream, on the other hand, is a totally different species of dreaming. It is ”not like the dream of sleep, which is created all alone in the depths of the body and of desire, it is a dream of the mind that has to be made, fabricated.”** Daydreams are not in any way a condition of the waking state in which they occur. They present dreaming as a productive force of one’s own consciousness, very much unlike the unconscious parallel universe reached while sleeping. Daydreaming might even be said to produce a continuous modulation of wake reality. Therefore, there is actually nothing of true escapism inherent in daydreams, they simply recreate reality to suit the desires and critical views of the mind.
Daydreams are works of art!
The relationship between waking reality and dreams is exactly the same as that between the sounding source of digitally recorded audio and the silent digital processes enabling it. But even more so the computer algorithm producing a sounding source to be recorded constitutes a parallel to the continuous modulation of waking mind trying to produce a more desirable reality than the one at hand. In this way the musical daydreamer produces new experiential categories for music, because the fixed stars of a night sleeping have instead turned into moonbeams shooting over the horizon and transforming the whole sky. Let’s get no sleep.
* Immanuel Kant ”Critique of Judgement”, 260.
** Gilles Deleuze ”Essays Critical and Clinical”, 172.
Written in 2006 as liner notes to the album Daydreaming by Rafael Anton Irisarri, released by Miasmah.
BCNVT / BIBLIOTEK 