I've been chasing my dreams almost since the day I was born.  An enterprise of dubious merit, I'll admit, since so many of them are silly and befuddling.  Yet those rare beauties, the bewitching dreams, are filled with a significance more terrible, are arrayed in colors more vivid, are invested with a deeper emotion, than any waking morning I have known.

But chasing dreams is not like chasing butterflies or bank robbers: what the conscious mind captures is but an empty husk, for the fairy spirits inhabiting those  forms cannot or will not cross over the threshold: they remain on the far side of an enchanted gate and evapoarate with the coming of day.

How then, in music, in literature and in art, can we penetrate quotidian consciousness in order to seize and to express in articulate form the elusive and precious essence of dreams - particularly as wistful inheritors of an artistic legacy that seems already to have done everything there is to do?

Well, I told myself what the quarterback told his teammates and fans after a slow start to the season: relax!  Then, failing to think of anything new, I took some old snippets of discarded piano pieces and such and transformed them by electronic means, in some cases beyond recognition, through a process of controlled aleatory (aleatory because I couldn't predict the outcome; controlled because my taste determined when the transformations were right).  I had performed similar operations on paintings and photos as a way of avoiding the cliched and predictable.

To my delight, I discovered these samples possess something of the terror, the raw, unmediated reality I find  in the unconscious.  At certain moments a long-forgotten melody rears up in a dark and turbulent sea, bearing a deep nostalgia, precisely as, in my dreams, the face of a loved one, long departed, is glimpsed fleetingly, as from afar, convulsing my heart.  

Alas, such revelations are private: just as that face I glimpse is beloved by me alone, that melody I discern is known to few besides me, and the associations it bears are purely personal.

I think this may be unavoidable, for to be free one must be original.  And so I took care, during the compositional process, not to impose, nor even to imagine, a form.  And in the end that form is strange indeed: sound nuggets, some extremely short, discontinuous, fluidly metamorphic and emotionally charged.  

Meanwhile, as I listened, in my mind's eye images began to arise, and magically to melt one into another: a  fast - approaching train became bells of some glorious doom, a unicorn dissolved into lemon-merengue, glittering bubbles coalesced to curtains, windblown and white, a distant planet was suddenly suffused in syrup...

...And it occurred to me that such music is fated for film.  For to express in words such things as "Pancakes from Betelgeuse" is to be at once overly specific and imprecise, whereas the medium of cinema affords both greater ambiguity and immediacy.  And so it is my hope one day to create some visual dreamscapes  to complement what you might consider, in their present state, soundtracks in search of stories.

But what has this music to do with pancakes and unicorns, really, since the images, after all, were after-thoughts rather than programmatic starting-points?  Perhaps we could think of them as visual metaphors for the ineffable.  Is this not the way of dreams?  The scenes and the people we encounter there often  seem props drawn from our experience whose role is to render palpable what is fundamentally strange...

...Unless, as some have insisted, it all means nothing, as the chemicals in our brains conspire to persuade us that gibberish and confusion are lucid glimpses into the deepest secrets, the ultimate nature, of reality.  What then?

Relax, I say again.  And let's try to avoid the habit of thinking in terms of either/or - another instance of how the conventions of language bind us.  Let's not ask whether or not dreams are meaningful: instead let's imagine that both propositions are inadequate to the complexity of life, where imagination interacts with and influences the world.  Let's believe, for a moment, that dreams are significant because they feel that way, and let's proceed, not so much to discover, in a passive way, that significance, as to create it through our responses in art.  May the aspirations of the heart come to govern the destiny of the universe.