Thoughts about LIGHTS. (Patreon)

Wow! This post is for everyone!

It's somehow the tenth anniversary of the release of LIGHTS. I was such a little baby (25 years old) at the time. I had absolutely no idea how badly my optimism about life would be punished in such a short span of time, but here we are!

LIGHTS is of course an album about death and loss. They say write about what you know! Well, I hope this post gives you some insight about something. Exactly what I cannot say for sure.

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FOREWARD

When I was a kid

I had two closets

And to me,

This was kind of weird.

From the earliest points in my life, the awkward beginnings of my experiences as a human being, I had dreams which involved things that I wished had been real, or in some cases, believed to be so real that I would have hysterical breakdowns that my family could not quell. But even as a somewhat functioning adult I have a difficult time dealing with my dreams.

It was first through dreams that I experienced the greatest losses. For many years, and even into today, I dream of unreal people with whom I wish to bond. Dream after dream of meeting somebody who wants to know me as much as I want to know them. I used to be shaken by these kinds of dreams, and I would feel the same level of melancholy for them as I did the dream which lead to LIGHTS. Why can't I know this person? When will I meet them in the waking world?

It was many years before realizing that when I dream of people like that, I am actually meeting myself. The desire that I have to know that other person is the same desire I have to know myself, because that other person is me - and because of that realization the concept dawned upon me that we are all searching for our selves in others. Or, to put it another way, it means that there is no difference between myself and others. I am you and you are me.

I can know myself through you, and you can know yourself through me. I do not exist in a vacuum - no human can. What we call 'identity' forms because it has boundaries which can be measured, and we constantly test those boundaries all the time - usually against other identities. Were it not for identity, we really would melt together and be each other. Yet in spite of that, the only way I can know myself is through you. We are truly connected!

So, dreams occupy a weird place in peoples everyday consciousness - Most people pass them off as random or meaningless, suggesting that only what happens when we are awake is what matters. This is funny to me, because our waking world is generated by the same brain which generates what we call dreams, so at the most basic level I see no difference between the two, and I find the idea of dreams being meaningless to be a supreme ignorance of obvious and free computational power.

Waking life is a guided dream, so dreams themselves are not separate from that, but are inexorable passages which add great value and context to an otherwise mundane experience.

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PROLOGUE

What once was in its place,

Is now gone without a trace

And I am left with nothing but a memory.

It is January 12th 2013. PROJECTIONS is still fresh in my mind, as it is going to be released into the world in a few weeks. At the moment I am sleeping. But I wake up in a cold sweat from a dream. It went like this:

I was walking the streets of the town in which I have spent my entire life, and it is night. The air is very cold. There are no cars, there are no people, there are no sounds. The road and the surrounding buildings on this central street are all well lit with a cool white light, as if it were day, but there is no light source and the sky is as black as void. I am walking toward the eastern sky, and ahead of me there is a ridge, covered completely in pine trees and lit as well as the buildings and road. This is, so far, all very normal!

But I reach an intersection in the road, and I stop, because above me, I can sense a red light brewing in the sky overhead. I look over the ridge above the trees, and there is a growing red nebulous shape in the sky. My (up until that point rather weirdly nonexistent) emotions begin stirring. Within me, curiosity sparks. I continue watching the red nebulous shape, when suddenly, it grows with a huge burst. Its features are less faded and more detailed. Its darkness is darker and its brightness is brighter. I am at this point awe-stricken. I feel that something is unfolding - some kind of beautiful feeling of "knowing" is washing over me. As I gaze, the red light in the sky becomes clearer, and suddenly I am closer to it. I can see in it! And oh, there is everything. I see galaxies, I see stars dying and becoming nebulae, and I see those nebulae birthing more stars. The space between everything seems smaller, and I experience the realization that there is so much more to learn and to see, and to know, about life. I want to see! I want to know!

Then I wake up.

I get really emotional about dreams. It's not unusual for me to cry, a lot, after having even simple dreams. Indeed, I cry a lot about everything in life - it's part of my unique intensity as a human being. This dream struck me in such a way that I cried about it for days. I felt overwhelmed at random times with many emotions.

The most powerful thing I felt from the dream was melancholy. A feeling of loss, for the fact that I would never actually be able to see the things I had seen in the dream, and this sense of loss was profound. I felt the tragedy of many years falling upon me and weighing me down all at once, wishing every day for the ability to experience clarity, only to gasp one desperate breath before fading into grey, and never really having known anything at all.

But! The chaos of everyday life, which at the time was at a peak for me, after some weeks had numbed away the disconcerting emptiness which comes with dreams such as these, and I filed it away as a memory I wished to keep at some distance.

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THE MAIN MEAT OF THE EXPERIENCE, ALSO KNOWN AS "THE GIST"

Like fireworks,

I saw the lights 

Filling up my shadow

It is July 3rd, 2013. Arkansas' summer is hot and rainy, but not rainy enough, because people have been lighting fireworks all around and I cannot catch any silence for the work I am doing on a piece of music I have tentatively titled "Laser Lights". I was annoyed somewhat at the celebratory atmosphere, because although I do love fireworks, I really am not keen on random explosions that go on for hours. The area where I worked on music, at the time, had many floor to ceiling windows which face north, and provide a decent view of the sky in that direction for their height and span. 

I had been listening to Laser Lights on repeat, as I do when working on music, and I was gazing out into the darkness with my headphones on, when I saw it. There was suddenly a burst of fireworks in that direction, framed just so that I could actually see them. I was not so annoyed now! There were many huge displays of color that rose up - Purple, Yellow, Green - And then a massive red shimmering. Then another. And yet more.

The red glowing of the fireworks. The fabulous display of sparking, twisting, dancing lights in the sky captured the cold memory of the dream and put it into perspective; once again, I was awash with that clarity. I never wanted to lose the feelings I had experienced ever again. I wanted to bind them up into something that could not only add substance to my life, but hopefully add substance to other peoples lives as well.

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EPILOGUE

Dawn, wake me up

But let me dream before I die

At the end of the very famous, very well-known videogame PROJECTIONS, the main character Aranactha says these words:

"I feel like I may wake up."

He then immediately dies. That is all.

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I don't care hard enough to actually write more about this. Anyway, LIGHTS is an album about death and loss. But you already knew that!

A lot of people know my music because of LIGHTS. That's cool! But I do a lot more than LIGHTS. I have also written LIGHTS 2, but most people call it Road to Jupiter. Rest assured, I will never write LIGHTS again. These are the only LIGHTS you will ever get.

Check out work other than LIGHTS on my bandcamp! Follow my work other than LIGHTS on bluesky!

Thanks a lot for reading! Goodbye now! Goodbye!