A situation I have to deal with in my life is that sometimes I am not sure whether I have dreamt something or whether it actually happened. This could be laid at the door of a terrible memory, along with a well-active dream machine. Or it could be due to a lack of commitment to what is constituted consensually as the real. Or it could just be that the difference does not really matter.
I was very sure I had two copies of Dream Villa on my bookshelves. The other day, when I thought to write on it, I went looking for both copies. It seemed necessary to have both arrayed, as if their double-ness would create a needed overlay of facticity on a book that, when it opens, asks you to slide in, even fall in, to a realm that is not interested in categories of the real.
I could not find the second copy. There was some disquiet, but then I became very certain that I had dreamt that Dayanita had given me two. It is a very clear dream though, like all dreams, the when and where are utterly unclear. Like time spent in the book, there is a feeling of excess that translates on the skin. There is an experience of exceeding from within—an overflow—that is not tethered to place or time.
Such as the image that you find when you open the book, and the book seems to will its opening to the pages with visible stitches—halfway exactly between the two covers. Is it dawn or dusk? Is that fire you see or are those autumnal leaves? The sky is becoming water and street lights are perhaps breaks in cloud cover. And running through all of these is the thread, reminding you that even though you hold a world and its dream in your hands, you also hold a book, rather heavy for its size.
On going further in the book, or on turning back pages, there is always more than one sun in a day that has turned into night. But since it could be both day and night, because there can be no definitive agreement on that, reality itself breaks down and becomes another colour. The book offers the poly-saturated nature of encounter itself. Unlike memory—so often spoken of in terms of fade—these hyper-saturated frames offer the realization that experience is also always a dream. And that colour is also an epistemic condition.
Through all of these, of course, is the darkness. A deepest black affecting the very paper itself. It’s a materiality that thickens through absence. If transparency is new beauty, if clarity is enlightenment, the shadows point to complexity, unpredictability, and potentiality. Such potentiality certainly exists in dreams, but with Dream Villa it also leaks into that which we all agree is the real.