Awake as a Hypnagog

~AWAKE~

I don’t like anything about any of these songs anymore, I feel sorry for you if you paid money for this. Someday I’ll be a good musician maybe.

Also,

Hypnagogia (also spelled hypnogogia) describes vivid dream-like auditory, visual, or tactile sensations, which are often accompanied by sleep paralysis and experienced when falling asleep or waking up.

~NAILS TO THE WALL~

“Being awake is the most universal hallucination known,” says Freedom.

The lighting is faint, swamp eyed heart swallows of gray swirl about the room. She is naked, standing by the window. Love. I feel love, and I don’t know if that is the same as in love, but she is draped in an aura only I can see and I know I’m awake because her words taste more alive to me than they could otherwise.

“You’re all so drunk on the fear of your own blood that you don’t ever poke out your tongue,” she demonstrates, “to both mock your destiny and pretend you love the taste of oxygen. You only use your tongue for food and sex.” She glances toward me, “Such a shame.”

She is an ephemeral (or ethereal?) being. Shifting shapes of expression and in no hurry to intellectualize. One philosophy thrown at me followed by another, neither holding any true relevance to any known context, or at least none according to my current state of mindlessness.

I can only further describe her as one’s first and most innocent love, but I must discontinue my description before I forget to enjoy her in this moment.

“Oh!,” she says. “He’s here.” It happens quickly. She is referring to her significant other I take it. One last drag on her cigarette and she extinguishes it onto a napkin on the dresser. In an electric panic I pocket the napkin. The doorknob is being handled and I am horribly anxious.

“This is your last series of moments, Maxwell,” He drones. “My name is Fate, pleased to make your acquaintance. I have known you since before the moon had a face, before the sun had a father. You will not remember anything of my countenance or idiosyncrasies when this is done, but I’ll proceed to grace your company with my own so that before you wake you can have had at least one worthy experience.” He clears his throat. “That napkin you just stole has some writing on it which I wrote soon after I came to be, which would be, by your count, if you could, trillions of years ago. You were meant to read it and it was meant to… befuddle your cool.”

He creeps me out.

Freedom runs her fingernails on the wall. There is no sound. Is she casting a spell? Who is Fate? Why is he called that? Her nails to the wall, my hand on Fate’s napkin, there is much meaning in all of this and I am too human to understand.

“Both of you get the fuck out of my house,” says Fate.

~SECRET IS IN THE SPIDER~

My pocket is smoking. The cigarette must have ignited the napkin. I remove both and try reading the dregs of script:

S-4$023PidDEr

I know I’m not dreaming because the sun is singing a marshmallow song out of oranges and purples, playing hide-and-seek in and amongst the myriad of sheep-like shapes in the shadows. I skip over cracks in the sidewalk.

Freedom and I come face to face and I do not smile until I smile.

“Have you read the napkin yet?” her hand rests on my cheek.

“It just says, ‘Spider,’” I say. I show her the napkin.

Her frown is almost ugly. “No, it says ‘Secret is in the Spider.” My brow furls. “Fate, my husband, thinks he has eight legs. His gravity is a guise; he’s the craziest of us all.”

We discover a quaint park with a quaint bench and so we sit and I listen.

“Fate lives in the center of a black hole,” says Freedom. She kicks nothing with her hanging feet in scissor swishes. “He is stretched to infinite and can feel the behavior of every subatomic particle. He can predict most human events on a mass and individual level with a 96.96% success ration.” She is smoking again. I never noticed her lighting a cigarette. “I’ve never discovered any sort of rational for his spider obsession, the way he identifies with them. ‘I feel every vibration on my web,’ he whispers in that arrogant, post-orgasmic, male moment after sex, ‘Secret is in the Spider,’ he murmurs in his sleep”

The sun changes clothes behind a millisecond eclipse. “I believe you,” I tell Freedom. I look at the napkin and the words have changed. They now read,

“You don’t believe in anything.”

We walk away from the park to find ourselves at the doorstep of a strip club called “Naked Identity.” Something above makes an eight-starred shadow and moves quickly before landing on us – this should hurt. This does not hurt. My imagination tells me that a robotic spider leg without intent or fabric has knocked me unconscious, but this is absurd and I do not believe in my imagination, just like you.

~NAUSEOUS CALLUSES~

I awake in a dim place. There is no width with which to spread arms. Metal rods face me; I am prisoner. My hand itches and so I scratch it in the dark until it bleeds, bleeds warm. My memory of Freedom is fading.

This place must manufacture loneliness.

A gust of desperation ricochets everywhere within and all I can do is whisper “come back,” and then again and then many more times, until I am in tears and clawing at my face, feeling as though I’ll never see Freedom again. I begin shouting, and the sound from my stomach outward horrifies me for I have never felt this kind of implosion. The desire to erase myself from my own memory rises,

rises, rises, and
rises,
and all I can do is scream.

“Stop shouting,” Fate, hollow as love-promise, approaches. “You’re going to wake up my army!”

My mental reaction is to tell him I want to die, that this place he has taken me to has sucked the desire to live from my heart mind and mouth and that he is the cruelest man since God, but my throat and chest are clogged and no words can get out.

“I am a great, great playwright, Maxwell,” he runs his knuckles along the concave of his side and will not meet my eyes. “My greatest play was called A Round Octagon, A Flat World, Our Nauseous Calluses,”

He describes his play in length. He is an unusually fabulous storyteller. His voice and eloquence pacify me.

“The finale is one of which manmade spiders the size of thought devour the world. First the cities and leaders, then the dreams. The shadow that came upon you is a detail of my great play’s finale which I never wrote.”

Enthralled and now active, I reply, “Then who did?”

“You,” says Fate. “We are all architects of our final moments; I am really just the scribe.” He grins and shifts his body toward an idea. “Well. Not just the scribe. I am THE Scribe, and I see that which happens. Of course you understand the ramifications.”

“Where is Freedom?” my voice cracks and my stomach is bottomless.

“Freedom,” he says. “My beloved.” He comes to my cage and put his hands (which briefly look like spiders and not hands) on the bars encaging me. “You will perform some music for her. A sort of requiem.”

He steps back and suddenly billions of spiders invade my cage, and as an arachnophobic person I should be terrified but the moment is over quickly. The spiders either perform… magic, or eat my cage so that I am free.

“Come Maxwell,” he says.

I follow him, reluctant.

“Fate?” I ask. Yes? He replies. “What matters?”

“So you’ve already discovered the gravity of when my wife passes. Best not to think about this,” he says. My eyes well up as we approach the future.

~WHY DO SOME HANDS LOOK LIKE SPIDERS?~

I follow spiders the size of camels as we descend a majestic, spiraling staircase of ancient stone. The bristles of arachnid fur cuffing my hands at my lower back nibble gently but menacingly. A red carpet leading into a hall dressed in chandeliers and other pomp oversees a perfectly spherical sculpture which possesses eight eyes and are positioned so that every entrance of this room is watched by it.

…I know I am awake because there is a liquid exhilaration in my bones I’ve never felt.

Fate holds a tome in his right hand, his left eye is black and his other is a sunset. I take it that this is Fate’s lair of sorts. And that this may be a dream. But there is no way for me to examine my hands as I am shackled and there are no light switches to toggle. Either way, I cannot be dreaming. I, just, can’t be. I’m awake. Strange as that may be.

“You play guitar like someone who cannot wake up. This is attractive to Freedom and so she chose you. Capricious and without practicality, that Freedom. I am loathe to her every nuance, Maxwell,” Fate says. We pass through many doors, Fate leading. “She has this silly obsession with hands. Of all symbols she believes they are the representatives of free will. She has never understood my affinity for spiders – universal fear – as the undeniable oppression of will. You’re all so drunk off the fear of your own blood that you lack the capacity for freedom. And then you die, Maxwell. You all die.

If you were free you would be living, not dying. You’re all dying and killing. Let a spider continue its journey over your body, sometime. That is, instead of misusing a perfectly good napkin to smash it. While it is true that spiders weave the threads of all events in a secret encoding in their webs, they’re just reporters.” He smiles and touches his chin. “Yes, spiders are journalists. And I’m their editor.”

We enter an orchestral chamber. A gong sounds. I am given a set of effects pedals and my guitar which someone must have stolen from my home. I say nothing about this, paralyzed by Fate’s words.

A man whose eyes are love or such that I cannot recall or tell of which approaches. His black collar rises higher than the top of his head, and his deathly white and key-slender hand reaches to shake mine. My hands are now free and so I join him with a shake and a forced smile.

He speaks.

“I am Dream, and there will be a skirmish!” His smile is like an orphan’s. “Fear not for you know you are awake!”

Music commences and I have little choice in its journey. The players below follow my fears like haystacks itching of hot needles.

Violin bows are rosined with stardust. Horns are unearthly flower petals. It is all very dreamlike, but I know I am awake.

~DREAM, SNIPER~

The brass section now holds grenades. And they unpin them, and they explode at the end of this paragraph. The pianist tugs a bladed boomerang from his Steinway. A flautist is loading his was-instrument with metal balls. Two violinists transform theirs into harpoon guns. (The brass section has hurled theirs toward the eastern wing where there was once a wall and there was now a smoking exit.)

Eyes and aura ablaze, Dream sheds his tuxedo and was now in purple fatigues.

“Intangibles, musicians, Canes and Abels, Oliver Twists and clock constrictors,” Dream’s tone is tube amp gritty; his militia makes formation and meets his pontifical tower stance.

“I would prefer to address you all as my brothers and sisters, as family, but in my heart is an afflicted and ineffable fact, which is that I only have one brother. As most of you know, Fate is him. He enslaved me to exclusivity of the unconscious when I met Freedom, and together we were to marry and carry on things such as joy and expression, but Fate stole her from me and tonight he will kill her! Let us stop him! Let us try although fail we may, we must battle this nightmare to dream!” He unsheathes a black sword. Its handle drips tiny tornadoes and its otherworldly metallurgy gives me a brief migraine. “Nice explosions, mis labrosones! TO THE EAST! TO HIS CHAMBERS!”

He scrambles and flings small planet-like contraptions that shoot nasty bullet-like things. Flames and venom, flares and BOOMS and vile spatters. “They’re only spiders! They’re nothing! They’re nightmares!” Spiders of all media flank all possible angles. “They’re only nightmares! DO NOT WAKE, MY ORCHESTRA! LET US DREAM HIM INTO THE DUSTS THAT CORRUPTED HIM!” Dream’s teeth are shark-like and his eyes are hidden by eyelids.

As quickly as it begins, it ends. Everything is dead. Massive exoskeletons cover cellos and tympanis, musicians are green and red of venom and blood. I am so very awake that I wish I were dead like everyone in the room.

Then the room becomes the inside of a washing machine and I am fumbling for consciousness.

~IDENTITY, STRIPPER~

I wake suddenly in a poorly lit place that smells like mothballs and sex. A flashing sign says “Naked Identity,” which I now remember is a strip club I came across with Freedom.

I seat myself next to a flake-skinned man who reeks of whiskey and severe loss. He is asleep or dead. I steal his booze and booze away. The collective mind and vagina are parched and indifferent. Freedom is dancing on a pole. I’m drunk. I barely know it’s her. I call to her, slurring, yelling, embarrassing.

“What did you say?” Freedom calls from the stage. She covers herself with hands and rushes down to my boozing. “What did you call me?”

“Freedom!” I reply. “You’re alive!” I am in love with her but only know how to guzzle this man’s whisky and stink.

Her face is close and so I study it. There are differences. She has either aged or I am drunker than I’d like to believe.

“Freedom is my sister,” says this naked stranger. A word rests at the roof of her mouth then flutters out unwillingly. She whispers the word, “was… She was my sister.” Her eyes filled with gravity. “Freedom was killed ages ago. By her husband. We try not to say his name around here, anymore. When we talk about him, things go wrong.”

My vision is blurring and the blurring becomes a whiting and the whiting becomes a shooting pain which immediately feels like a guilty orgasm in the center of my skull. I fall into a brief nightmare full of cold and condescending voice.

~FATE, SCRIBE~

Good evening, Maxwell. I have nothing to say, really. Except that it has been years for you since I killed Freedom. And, well, I’ll amuse you further. You’ll need something to lie about when you wake and jot this all down in your journal.

Here you are in Identity’s raunch-house, drunk out of your mind, still dreaming this dream of me. How many sub-dreams can you have? You are a terrible little crazy person. A Hypnagog. That word now exists. And you are it.

Anyhow, I am eager to let you know that there is a chance in your interpretation of this dream that Identity may actually be lying to you and that she may be Freedom. You never witnessed me kill her. And you know in your own psychotic study of things that Freedom and Identity are very similar, if not identical in meaning. Or rather, they are, ahem, necessarily contingent.

Oh what the hell, you won’t remember this, anyway! I did kill Freedom. Go figure. I’m the bad guy, right?

There’s no Hope, Maxwell. No Hope. Have a nice hangover in the whorehouse!

-FATE

PS. On that topic of…Hope. Dream probably would have told you about her if he hadn’t died so (ig)nobly in that battle of Musicians vs. Nightmarish Arachnids.

Hope was Dream’s daughter.

She was one of the violinists in that skirmish of ours. You may have stepped on her guts before you fell into your little pseudo-coma.

Ciao!

~NEVER SLEEP AGAIN~

Dear journal,

What the fuck is a hipnogog?

~AS A HYPNAGOG~

(for this text you have to have a physical copy of the album)

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Credits

awake
used the wrong type of cassette tape in a 4 track tascam recorder typa-thingy and when i put it in the stereo to listen it was all slowed down. I played along with it a bit and discovered it was exactly an octave down. Convenient for overdubs but I left it as was. Ran the 4 track into my computer and used a plug in to drop the recording an octave so it’d sound how it sounded out of the stereo.
Nails to the wall
this melody was originally written with lyrics that had something to do with running out of cigarettes on my way to new york. In October 2006.
Secret is in the spider
the ending part of this track is kind of a little foreshadow to some melodies in track 9, which was originally titled “freedom’s funeral.” Secret was supposed to be that fate kills freedom. This is such a horrible idea for an album.
Nauseous calluses
this was the first track recorded for the album when it was going to be called “dizzy fingers.” Each track was going to be titled according to something having to do with worldly dysfunction in relationship to hands, hands being the symbol of free will, ability to make choices. The quote is from ‘I heart huckabees.’ I hope I get sued. Legit.
Why do some hands look like spiders?
I am so incredibly gangster that I stole my partner in crime’s lyrics which she stole from my room mate to center my concept album around the idea that everything’s relative and all that college wankery as my other partner in crime would probably sneer.
dream, sniper
fyi… there are no real drums on any of these tracks except for the bongos in track 3. oh, and I imagined Dream as looking like… you know… neil gaiman’s rendition. Or, his artist’s rendition… READ SANDMAN!
identity, stripper
almost everything in this, instrumentally, is from a roland w30… an 80s synth that uses floppy drives to load sounds. Raw style. I recently sold it because the dmv thinks speeding should be FINED.
Fate, Scribe
The drums in this are from an rp80 digitech pedal ran through about 5 other pedals which makes the drums go “wah wah” and stuff. And I ran those same pedals out of the w30 and messed around with it… did the guitar track last. With the same 5 pedals. Sold those all for the dmv and other bureaus of stench as well.
Never Sleep Again
That’s “birds fled from me” there at the end. Look her up. And “too dark for a picture.” That’s us. Her and me. As a thing. Musically.
As a hypnagog
I have no motherfucking clue.