Night represents a time of cosmic rhythm and sleep a time of biological rhythm. The processes that belong to sleep are those of repetition and respiration, this is reflected in nature, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the return to day, in the turn of the seasons. As the earth turns away from the sun our ability to see colour is diminished, with the absence of light, sight retreats. When we close our eyes to sleep there is an absence of vision and visibility. Day is revealed by light and is wholly outside while night identifies with the inside, the back of eyelids, of caves and crypts.

Although we have markers of time to bring order to our world, our internal experience of time in the dream state is not subject to external rules and reality, our perception of time is different depending on whether we are awake or asleep. When we are awake we are live in a shared world.  By contrast, sleeping is done alone, in our individual worlds. When we sleep we might say that the self disappears, we lose the ability to recognise ourselves as an ‘I’. We simply are. What rises up in sleep are dream images, memories and feelings, experienced as hours but lasting only minutes.

The Sleeping Self Does Not Appear is a poetic exploration and inquiry into our experience of time and space within the state of sleep, the inter relationship between the human body and celestial bodies and a return to a self where a subjective ‘I’ does not exist through the process of giving into sleep. The work positions itself on the intersection of cosmology, philosophy and the study of the unconscious.