SLEEP
CATALOG DREAMS No.2 - SLEEP SPECIAL
Catalog Dreams: Do you ever get the urge when out driving late at night to pull up outside a strangers house, stand at their window and steal a look through the curtains inside? Over a billion homes on this planet and in each and every one a unique home movie plays out night after night. What do people do when they’re home alone? What do they wish for? When they sleep, what do they dream of? Catalog Dreams: Four ever-evolving photo-essays. Furtive fantasies. Original life.
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INTRODUCTION
‘IN DREAMS’
Catalog Dreams: Twenty years ago I might have introduced this ’Sleep Special’ by making the observation that we spend over a third of our lives asleep. But that’s no longer true. Year on year we're encouraged to sleep less and less. Why? Because sleep is under siege. Who’s waging war on sleep? Modern living. Industry. Capitalism. After all, we can’t work and we can’t consume when we’re asleep. It’s reassuringly difficult for industry to quantify and capitalise upon what happens in our sleep but infiltrating our sleeping state, whether a digital or pharmaceutical intervention or some other kind is getting easier and more commonplace all the time.
How fully do we understand sleep? Not so fully it seems and perhaps that dark mystery is its splendour and vital camouflage. Expert Matthew Walker considers plentiful sleep essential to our health, describing it as ‘a consoling neurochemical bath.’ Sounds lovely, but beyond sleeps vital role in not only our physical but also mental health, socially and politically sleep is so much more. It’s currently the one place, the only place where we're free from control, where we are uncontrollable and unaccountable: in dreams. Perhaps no one understands the cultural importance of our escape into darkness and sleep better than Jonathan Crary who maintains that ‘just before we sleep we come alive. We hear things. Our disengaged senses return.' If we can only become our true selves in sleep, then in this reverse Jekyll and Hyde, who are we really and when we finally slip life’s leash each night, just where is it that we go?
In the wonderful ‘On Grief and Studio Ghibli’ Karl Thomas Smith contends that ‘the world at large, to its great shame, is scornful of people who live deeply. And that scorn is not just a benign clucking of the tongue. It is white-hot and razor sharp’ - ‘a reminder to think again before exposing yourself to a world in which the done thing is to simply bury the light of those feelings until they are extinguished by a lack of air.’ As ever Catalog Dreams No.2 is a love letter to those people who choose to live deeply somewhere beyond the herd, and nowhere deeper than in night and shadow and sleep.
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No.11 - JP
Above - July 2023. VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios.
‘FUCKING YEARS'
JP: “Years off my life! Not sleeping. Fucking years. That’s what they tell me anyway. But you can’t force it to happen (sleep). I wish I could just turn it on. Press a button or put a sleep hat on or something - anything. I’ve tried everything. The reality is... I just lie there and wait for it to happen. And wait… And wait…”
No.10 - CRYSTAL TRAN
Above - Dress: Bella Freud - Shoes: Paris Texas - Helmet: AGV Italia - May 2023.
‘SLEEP MODE’
Crystal Tran: “Do you ever get that weird sensation when it feels like your cell(phone) is vibrating in your pocket but you reach for it and it’s not even in there? Y’know… ? And then seconds later you hear it ring!? Do you ever get that? Like your body’s on vibrate? And you know someone’s gonna call before they call? Like you’ve gotten too connected - to your phone? Like you kinda are your phone? Well sometimes I get something a bit like that at night when I go to sleep.”
Catalog Dreams: “So what’s that like?”
Crystal Tran: “Well, I guess it’s like I’m not awake but I’m not asleep - I’m somewhere in-between - like I’m on standby - in sleep mode. It feels like all the technology we use, all that stuff around us is connected to me, part of me and I’m part of it - and we’re synching - like we’ve become this new thing that’s sort of alive and it wants to keep me from sleeping, keeps pulling me back and I don’t exactly fight it because I feel kind of weird n’ numb around it cos it makes me feel uneasy and I know it doesn’t intend on letting me go - but I always escape in the end - I sort of sink through it - like it’s a kinda… membrane? Right? And I’m gone.”
Catalog Dreams: “Gone where?”
No.9 - ALEXANDRA & VICTORIA
Above - Tracksuit: Adidas Originals - Sneakers: Nike Air Force 1 - Riding Hat: Decathlon - August 2023.
‘SPEAKING FRENCH’
Catalog Dreams: “Being twins, I’m curious to know if you’ve ever had the same dream?”
Alexandra: “(nodding) We’ve had the same dreams.”
Catalog Dreams: “You know statistically the likelihood of having the same dream, on the same night, is very…”
Victoria: “Very low. Mum walked in on us once when we were asleep and we were speaking French to each other, in our sleep.”
Alexandra: “But we don’t speak French."
No.8 - TABATHA
Above - Electrotherapy sleep glasses: TensCare Oko - August 2023.
‘SLEEP V.O.D’
Tabatha: “Sometimes I can wake from a dream and if I’m loving it I can go to the bathroom or whatever and then get back into bed and drop straight back into my dream and pick up right where I left off. Do you ever get that? I can sort of turn it on and off. Because I don’t want to miss a thing. I guess the dream does warp a bit, but it’s still the same dream. I just pause it. But when I come back I can focus on the part I’m enjoying the most and drill down into that. I suppose it’s kinda interactive. Like sleep V.O.D. With a toilet break."
No.7 - WAI-LING
Above - Gloves: Prada - May 2023.
‘LUXURY DREAM PILL’
Wai-Ling: “What if you could just take a pill and have any sort of dream you want? Like a luxury dream pill. Like I’m in my own perfume commercial with clothes like you’ve never seen before! Sheer luxury. Yes - a luxury dream pill."
Above - Shoes: Viktor & Rolf X Melissa - Dress: Bella Freud - July 2023. VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios.
‘PAINLESS'
Catalog Dreams: “What do you imagine the side-effects of your luxury 'dream pill’ would be?"
Wai-Ling: “I suppose there’s always a price to pay. …maybe emptiness? I can’t imagine it would be painless. And whose dreams would I be dreaming?"
Above - Glasses: Versace - Dress: Bella Freud - Bag: Vintage Gucci - July 2023. VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios.
‘HORRIFIC'
Wai-Ling: “But I guess the big problem with just swallowing a pill and having any fabulous dream you want is that the real world would seem pretty drab. The contrast… Between how you live and how you'd want to live. You’d want to dream all the time - to escape reality. Because waking up would be… horrific.”
Above - Jumpsuit: Adidas Originals - Sneakers: Adidas Originals - July 2023. VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios.
‘AN AGENDA'
Wai-Ling: “I wonder if these synthetic dreams could ever be as rich as the dreams we have naturally? As imaginative or as fascinating to us? Because if someone else has conceived them for us in some sense, could they ever be important to us? Or really touch us? And what would their agenda be? Because I’m sure there’d be an agenda.”
Above - Clockwise from left - #1 - Tracksuit: Adidas Originals - #2 - Dress: Unselfish Lover - Shoes: Vintage Gucci - #3 - Dress: Norma Kamali - Shoes: Vivienne Westwood - #4 - Jumpsuit & Sneakers as before - #5 - Dress, Shoes, Glasses & Bag as before - #6 - Shoes: Vivienne Westwood - July 2023. VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios.
‘CONSTANT STATE OF FABULOUS’
Wai-Ling: “But I don’t think that’d stop people. They’d want to sleep and dream all the time. You’d want to be in a constant state of fabulous. And if you couldn’t afford luxury dreams you’d probably buy the fake dreams you could pick up cheap on holiday - in Marrakech or Turkey or wherever. They’d hollow you out at twice the speed I bet. But they’d be dark and interesting for sure."
No.6 - LINA
Above - Shoes: Vivienne Westwood - Sleeping Bag: Mammut - June 2023.
‘LIGHTNING STRIKE’
Lina: “I have a recurring nightmare. It used to always happen the night before I was going to be ill. I’m walking along a long white wall in a featureless white landscape. I’m just moving ahead. It takes forever, but there’s always this growing sense of horror at what I will find at the end of it. The atmosphere is buzzing - it smells like electricity, like when you are close to a lightning strike. I’m scared because I know there’s something very frightening to me hiding around the corner at the end and I’m getting closer towards it. I get to the end and I turn the corner terrified and there it is, waiting, looking straight back at me, my greatest fear.”
Catalog Dreams: “And what is it?”
No.5 - WAI-LING
Above - Shirt: William Wilde - Glasses: vintage Dolce & Gabbana - Ring By Pariah - February 2023.
‘GEORGE MICHAEL’
Wai-Ling: “When people die my Mum cuts them out of photographs. I don’t think it’s a Chinese thing. I think she does it because she’s sad. Maybe it’s like ‘just move on’. But I do wonder if it’s about ghosts. Maybe ‘gone’ isn’t exactly ‘gone’ for her. She’s never explained why she does it.”
“There’s a lot of people I wish weren’t gone. George Michael. Prince. Freddie Mercury. David Bowie. Maybe you’re only gone when people stop dreaming of you?”
No.4 - JANELLE
Above - Sunglasses: Louis Vuitton / Gucci - May 2023.
’TIGHT TIGHT ASSES’
Janelle: “All I can tell you is I see all these perfect noses and smooth faces and thick heads of hair - all these tight tight asses walking around all day long - on people younger than me now and I guess it filters down into my dreams y’know? So I spot these perfect features on these beautiful young things and I just reach forward and take them. Just rip them off. In my dreams! Easy as that - just grab myself a new nose - a new complexion or whatever - and I know it’s wrong but I can’t trust myself not to grab some right there and then - to get me some of those perfect features - in the restroom at a restaurant or a club or wherever. In the street. BAM! New eyes! In the gym. BAM! Tight little buns! Why wouldn’t I (laughing)? I know! It’s extreme - and pretty messy! But that’s what I dream. Taking the perfect nose! Wrinkle free eyes! Helping myself.”
No.3 - WAI-LING
Above - Dress: Vintage Top Shop Boutique - Shoes: Rag & Co. - Bag: Hermes - June 2023.
‘PLAY DEAD’
Wai-Ling: “Sometimes I like to pretend to be dead - or asleep. It amuses me. Maybe it’s me confronting death. I just like that I can. Because I’m alive. It makes me feel alive.”
Catalog Dreams: “Sleep gets used as a euphemism for death a lot. ‘At rest’. ‘Eternal sleep.’ ‘Rest in peace’. The two are very connected.”
Wai-Ling: “………….. .”
Catalog Dreams: “You’re doing it now, aren’t you?”
No.2 - JONATHAN
Above - Suit: Crayola - May 2023.
’DYING A WORK OF ART’
Jonathan: “It’s easy to forget that in the late 80’s and early 90’s many of us in the West were dying of AIDs related illnesses. People at art school, on the club scene, at work, back home, people everywhere were dying. Someone I knew and worked with, a Love Ranch regular, was I guess looking to find some kind of permanence as his illness got worse so each morning on the way to work he’d go see Denis Cockle in Soho and get whatever he’d dreamed the night before tattooed onto his body - without exception. I can remember him telling us he’d dreamed of a small animal, a stoat or a weasel? There it was, freshly tattooed into him. Just whatever his subconscious brought to him in his dreams, whether serious or bizarre or stupid. There was no right or wrong, no good or bad. Each dream was inked into his skin. By the end of his illness, just before death, he had become this extraordinary canvas for sleep, covered in its tattoos. Literally dying a work of subconscious art.”
No.1 - KIM
Above - Reflection: You - May 2023 - Present.
‘I’VE SEEN THINGS’
Kim: “Everybody knows if you’re born blind 'you - don’t - dream - in - pictures'. Because you don’t know what stuff looks like. And that’s sort of true. I mostly dream in sounds and tastes. And smells. And feelings. In touch - y’know, how stuff feels but more than that. I dream different to you. Yeah? But over my lifetime more than once I’ve dreamed in pictures. Not so often. But when I’ve been asleep I’ve seen. Maybe they’re not pictures just like you see. But I’ve seen things... .”
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CONCLUSION
‘AN END’
Catalog Dreams: It seems that everything must come to an end. I write this conclusion to the Catalog Dreams ‘Sleep Special’ as I hurtle north on a fast train through early morning light to visit my dying father for what will prove to be the very last time so please forgive my sentimentality. In reading back the very first interviews that began to shape this ‘Sleep Special’ and in looking around the carriage at the perfectly ordinary sleeping passengers - themselves no doubt dreaming diverse and original dreams, I’m struck by the startling creativity that we are capable of in the hours around sleep. I’m equally struck by the surprisingly fearful relationship many of us have with the internal (and eternal) stranger that is sleep and so a question forms in my mind. I wonder about the nature of our existence - about which any of us who have been touched by grief could be forgiven for wondering from time to time, and the significance of the metamorphosis our conscious self surrenders to each and every night.
‘THE MAIN EVENT’
The question is a big ‘what if?’ I’m playing fast and loose here but regardless, the question that forms in my mind is this: what if sleep, not our daily lives, is the main event? What if we live to sleep, not sleep to live? What if we are in fact nocturnal, ‘living our best life’ with our eyes shut? What if the part before birth, and the part after death are extensions of that sleep? What if everything doesn’t have to come to an end? What if the whole world has it wrong: have you ever wondered that? What if our often mundane and for many people regularly nightmarish daily existence is the part of least value from which only sleep or death can offer us a nightly and ultimately permanent release? Clinging to each other by day - flying free by night. What if the richness of night renders day meaningless, not the reverse as we have long been led to believe? What if our daily life is nothing more than sleeps effluent?
‘SOME TRIP’
An obvious point never made is that we, humanity, are incapable of harming one another in sleep. Is sleep us at our best? What if our chaotic violent daily existence makes no sense to us for good reason? Could our waking life be nothing more than a baffling rhythmic hiatus from sleep because an eternity of sleep and dreams makes absolute sense when you consider the striking fact that no matter the horrors that can befall our daily human existence - it’s still possible no matter your circumstances to have the most incredible and uplifting dreams by night. Though day infiltrates our dreams it is always night that has the final say. Surely by comparison our days are dulled? Awake are we stuck on standby like Crystal Tran, in sleep mode - ready to burst into life as our eyes close? What if day is simply there to provide vital maintenance on the vessel that carries us in and out of sleeps restorative comfort? What if day is there to provide us with the experiences, the raw building blocks and the characters with which we dream? What if day teaches us the language, and night encourages us to run with it? Deliciously, what if in death we’re finally ready to be set loose and fantasise eternally? What if sleep is a preview of the afterlife? What if our very purpose… is to learn how to dream and how to die, and what if the two are one and the same thing? Now that would be some trip. Surely that would make some sense of this life?
‘A DREAM, A SLEEPWALKING, A SEANCE’
In 2012 the film writer and historian David Thomson captured the magic of cinema with this singular beautiful line: ‘Movie is a dream, a sleepwalking, a seance in which we seem to mingle with ghosts.’ I would maintain that the reverse is also true; that dreams are movies, a seance in which we not only mingle with ghosts, we actively breathe life into the spirit plane. We not only conjure the ghosts, we are the ghosts. We are the director, the camera operator, the projectionist and Edward Hopper’s troubled usherette in ‘New York Movie’ - stood in the shadows contemplating our own cinematic existence. I’d argue that we are at our richest and most creative when we’re asleep, our waking hours merely a holding pattern for what is really the main event; sleep - our subconscious movie existence beyond rules and restrictions, beyond the humdrum and the familiar and the temporal, where we can finally transcend our bodies and this earthly existence: in high art. In dreams.
’SPECTRAL CHATTER’
If our dreams are high art then that makes everyone in this world an artist. Because no matter our privileges or lack of, no matter our affluence or career, our assumed intelligence or the perceived merit of our daily artistic capabilities; in sleep everybody is capable of the most remarkable visions, epiphanies and prophecies. Sleep is the great leveller. Is it not remarkable that much of our most celebrated art by day is deeply reminiscent of our nightly dreams, whether Hieronymus Bosch, Leonora Carrington, William Burroughs, David Lynch or the sublime Louise Bonnet? Are these celebrated individuals just more adept than others at tapping into their dream state? Are they not making dreams? Is art itself not an attempt to communicate with our dream state, with our dream self? When people say that they believe there might be something more to life, that they believe there might be something out there they can’t explain, do they not find it with bells on every night atop their mattress? Is it not uncanny that all the hallucinations, trances, visions, visitations and apparitions that underpin every religion and every culture that is or has ever been on this planet sound uncannily and exactly as remarkable as the dreams we dream in sleep? Is it any accident that the thing we fear the most beyond death itself, the supernatural, is forever inextricably entwined with the hours we spend asleep, or is it any coincidence that the ‘witching hour’ may well coincide with our deepest sleep of all? Or is ‘dreams’ just the wrong label? Are dreams really dreams at all, or are they radio traffic, spectral chatter, communications between past, present and future us in a deepwater dialect our daily self cannot fathom?
‘CANDY DARLING’
We’ve asked so many questions here and somewhat appropriately found so few answers. Regardless, as ever Catalog Dreams No.2 is a celebration of all those who love to ‘slip life’s leash’. Thank you to every individual dreaming deeply and generously here in these pages. By return, if nothing else I hope in attempting to capture these dreams, this reverie, that in some way the camera bestows upon these fantasies some kind of death defying permanence just as Peter Hujar’s gloriously tender masterpiece of sleep leaves Candy Darling to be found eternally on her deathbed, forever on the cusp of death but forever beautiful, defiantly immortal in our collective consciousness. Just as in our dreams the loved ones we have lost live on and on, as alive as they ever were, is it any wonder that so many of us aspire to die in our sleep, to die a ‘good’ albeit statistically unlikely death asleep, surely because deep down we recognise that there’s some kind of eternal life in the unconscious? In Catalog Dreams No.2 we’re not just shooting the shadows before they’re gone - we’re preserving them for eternity and as we do so we’re beginning to cast a few of our own, perhaps even enriching the dream state we will without fail return to this evening with a new character or two by our side.
‘GOODNIGHT’
I’ve used so many words here when perhaps Studio Ghibli’s Miyazaki already said it best with pictures in a dream of a scene; a young girl also on a train, travelling out into the indistinct fringes of a world that might or might not be ours with two curious companions and death sat beside her.
As I return to finish writing this it’s getting late now. The light has dimmed more than I’d anticipated. There’s nothing left to say but to wish you goodnight. As you slide into your dreams and sleep picks you up and puts you out like a metaphorical cat to roam your psychological night, straying far from home across an extraordinary landscape where quite literally anything is possible, given everything we’ve discussed and experienced here perhaps you’d consider staying for just a moment longer as we softly ask ourselves over and over, mantra like, one last but very important question; Why be dull? Why be dull? Why be dull? Why be dull? Why be… du… … ll… ?
END
Photography: Johnny Hardstaff - Styling: Catalog Dreams & interviewees 2023 - Text: Catalog Dreams - May 2023
VFX: Adam Crocker / Andrew Bartholomew / Matthew Hutchins - Producer: Paul Branch / Kit Hartley @ Black Kite Studios London
Creative Director: Johnny Hardstaff
With thanks to Yumi Yoshinaga & Ben Webster @ Leica UK / Verity White / Founding Partner Graham Bird & Black Kite Studios / the Stanley Kubrick Archive / Eliza Williams @ Creative Review / Alex Marden @ Art Department & not least Wai-Ling.
Supported by the Jonathan Foundation.
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