Alicia Clara, Daydream, Nothing Dazzled (Self-released)

“…dreams are the commonest and universally accessible source for the investigation of man’s symbolizing faculty…”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

The year was 2003. I had enrolled for a second time as an undergraduate in university, believing that returning to school and obtaining a liberal education would be the ticket to my success. It was an honest mistake.

I had signed up for a semester-full of introductory courses: Sociology, Latin, Cinema Studies, Symbolic Logic, and Psychology. And it was during one of our first Psych lectures that the young female instructor presented a history of dream interpretation to the class. Our dreams, she said, were viewed differently by various philosophers and psychoanalysts throughout history.

Sigmund Freud, for example, believed that dreams were a combination of repression and wish fulfillment. Carl Jung thought that they served a highly symbolic function, which could only be deciphered through a complex series of relational and interpretational associations.

Or possibly, a cigar was just a cigar, and dreams could simply be the random cataloguing of the day’s conscious events as a librarian might reshelve a stack of unrelated books. One thing was certain, though: dreams undeniably possessed some causal link to current occurrences in everyday life.

Attempting to engage a more-or-less disinterested lecture hall of juvenile scholars, our instructor petitioned us by suggesting things that we might have recently been dreaming about. For instance, a conversation with a friend, or a dispute with a family member. But no one raised their hand.

She then tried to conceive of something more universal that maybe a majority of the class had encountered in our nocturnal reveries. As the United States under its worst president to date had just then invaded Iraq, she suggested that a number of us must have been dreaming lately about war in the Middle East. But again, not a glimmer of sympathy from her audience.

“Come on!” she said incredulously. “You mean to tell me that nobody in this room has been dreaming about Bush?”

Slowly, the class began to erupt in laughter as many of us silently thought, “well, actually…” Indeed, equally as many in attendance might have also been dreaming about Bush’s second in command, Dick.

The Voice of Nature with Beth Taylor, 5ème Salle, 17 August 2025

“The soul of man is like water. First, it comes down from heaven, then it ascends into heaven; and again it must go down to earth in eternal change.”
—Hans Schwarz, On the Way to the Future.

The tension of history is that between a dialectical or upward-and-forward progression and a cyclical or sinusoidal up-and-down succession.

We know from observation and experience that nature passes through seasons in a circular momentum — summer becomes fall, fall winter, winter spring, and eventually summer returns.

But we also hope that the next season, the next year, the next century, will be markedly better in measurable ways — that progress will improve our lives, that technological advances will benefit humanity and unburden us from such antiquated incumbrances as labour and conflict, inequality and injustice.

Or, we look with nostalgia to precedent seasons, years, centuries to lament how much worse life has become, how we appear to have deteriorated and descended from some idealized age.

The disproportionate obsession with either the future or the past always seems to be strongest when the state of the present is at its weakest.

Karma Glider with Shunk and Poolgirl, Casa del Popolo, 5 September 2025

As summer turns into autumn, the tendency is to revert to melancholy retrospection, re-examining the previous season’s satisfying times. There is an equal measure of pleasure and pain to this exercise, one in gratitude for agreeable experiences, the other with a sense of loss and longing for things passed.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures,” writes the theologian C.S. Lewis, “speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

~Ondes~, Frotae with Ivy Boxall, White Wall Studio, 27 August 2025

The only constant is change. This is the paradox that confronts us continuously. The steady hum of electricity is merely an artificial distraction from life’s natural chaotic state. The desire to fix events in time — through recording or photography or cinematography or the written word — neglects the obvious and unavoidable truth that we ourselves are different every time we consult these texts. Not only do we never step in the same river twice; each time, the river fails to recognize our feet.

Organ Intermezzi with David Simon, The Church of St. Andrew & St. Paul, 28 August 2025

Images of war saturate our media to such an extent as to desensitize the observer.

We are regularly bombarded with depictions of starving children clamouring to fill a dented metal receptacle with a ladleful of mushy gruel as if viewing this scene one more time will be enough to finally shock those of us fortunate enough not to be on camera into singlehandedly stopping these atrocities.

Of course, none of us want this — independently nor collectively — and none of us enjoy these images or condone them, and none of us can stop them alone. We are condemned, then, to watch them over and over with an increasing feeling of indignant vulnerability and survivor’s guilt. And yet, in order to survive and carry on with our lives we must, to a certain extent, ignore escalating atrocities and implicitly, in doing so, overlook them.

The American critic Susan Sontag in her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others quotes Leonardo da Vinci at length, offering formulaic instructions for painting battle scenes:

Make the conquered and beaten pale, with brows raised and knit, and the skin above their brows furrowed with pain … and the teeth apart as with crying out in lamentation … Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust … and let the blood be seen by its color flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Others in the death agony grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes, with fists clenched against their bodies, and the legs distorted.

These could just as easily be directives given to war photographers from brazen if-it-bleeds-it-leads news producers in 2025.

It is relatively easy to portray physical pain. Representing the misery of helplessly witnessing it on an apparently endless loop, not so much.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 27 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}