June 1, 2026
Painting is incredibly hard.
1
Parking garages are the most frequent setting for my dreams. Sometimes they are crumbling. Sometimes they are flooded. Sometimes I find my parents there. I'm always trying to find my car.
Last night I dreamt I was walking the jetway to an enormous Korean airplane when I keeled over because of an unholy pain behind my face. Several people were inside my mouth, writing strange graffiti across my teeth, and I frantically tried to get this under control before my flight departed.
Most of my dreams occur at airports, train stations, parking lots, and docks—places for waiting to go elsewhere. But where?
2
For most of my life, I discounted my dreams as random babble drawn from the muck of memory. If you scatter a few coins across a table, the eye hunts for a pattern, so naturally the day's riff-raff would be hung on the skeleton of narrative, however bizarre or rudimentary. But now I believe dreams serve a more vital function.
My dreams allow new truths to marinate and seep into my bones. Sometimes this process takes years. For instance, in 2010 or so, I came across this idea from Epictetus: Do not say something has been lost; say it has been returned. A decent piece of clichéd wisdom, I thought. But after my parents died, I returned to this sentiment with urgency. And although these words comforted me on an intellectual level, it would take years of dreaming before I came to inhabit them.
In the immediate wake of grief, my dreams were full of horror. Finding my father in the shadows of a parking garage. Discovering my mother beneath an overpass. Jagged fever dreams in which they were dead but shouldn't be, or worse, alive but shouldn't be.
Over the years, almost imperceptibly the way water shapes a pebble, these dreams became smoothed out, easier and warmer, until I was no longer afraid to enter the parking garage. Oh, there they are. I'm so lucky to have known them, and yes, this is where they've been returned. So I've come to believe that life's big-budget wisdom has three levels:
- Wisdom is encountered (and often dismissed) as cliché.
- This wisdom is remembered and understood through experience.
- The wisdom becomes truly inhabited through dreams.
I think this is why so many of my dreams occur at sites of transit, suspended between two places.
3
Salvador Dali said his paintings were "hand-painted dream photographs," and on Saturday night, we gathered in a friend’s warehouse to paint while M. mixed the best techno tracks ever. It’s already one of my happiest memories, a dozen of us studiously painting to the heavy thump and whir of 808s and 303s.
A glorious minute of Painting Club
Demons and robots were the subjects of our previous Painting Club sessions, and they were child's play compared with that night’s theme: Love. After a bout of sighing, my thoughts turned to Klimt’s Judith I, how her face offers an intensely terrifying flavor of love as she grips the bloodied head of Holofernes. So I tried to paint my own version, and as I pushed a fleshy blob of acrylic around the canvas, I felt a hypnagogic calm.
4
I believe the following activities are connected: Meditating. Climbing mountains. Doomscrolling. Praying while kneeling on rice. Fasting. Jumping out of an airplane. Snapping a rubberband against your wrist to stop a bad habit. They're all chasing the same sensation: Presence. An escape from the chattering mind. An abrupt, even if painful, return to the here-and-now. The trick is to keep this desire aimed in a good direction.
Sometimes I experience presence while writing, which keeps me coming back despite the self-loathing. Sometimes it shows up when I run, although not as often as I'd like. And I felt it that night at the easel. A few days later, I bought my own set of oil paints and continued my attempt to copy Judith. So far, I've learned that mixing ultramarine with burnt umber produces an excellent black, and soft dabs with a dry brush help smooth out the streaks. I also discovered that painting is maddeningly difficult.
My Judith is not yet as convincing as Cecilia Giménez’s restoration of Ecce Homo, but I intend to keep plugging away until it's reasonable enough to share with you. By then, hopefully I'll have the skillset to paint some dreamy airports and nightmarish parking garages.
5
Like painting, dreams are about presence. It's the only time we're released from ego and intention. Dreams dredge up our mess and drop us into the here-and-now of it, which leads to tonight's soundtrack.
It's a busy swirl that begins with Pink Floyd’s "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" (a few shades slower, naturally) and ends with Mika Vainio’s stark cover version. There’s also a pair of Seefeel remixes, a dash of Springsteen, some Spiritualized, and a lot of murmuring. I was aiming for something warm, maybe a little pretty and sinister, that feels like sinking into the soft ground of a dream.
When I played tonight’s songs for C’s approval, she called it my “magical mushroom mix” and made groovy far-out gestures to underscore her point. She meant this in an encouraging way, I think, so I photographed her hands being psychedelic and that’s how we arrived at the artwork for this episode.
- Pink Floyd - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (19% slower)
A Saucerful of Secrets • 1968 - Flavor Crystals - Cetecea (Seefeel Adjustment)
Five • 2020 • Bandcamp - Anthony Calonico - Collapsing
Spacious Heart • Music From Memory, 2026 • Bandcamp - Ana Roxanne - Wishful (Draft)
Poem 1 • Kranky, 2026 • Bandcamp - Blackwater - Oaxaca
Navigation • Ethbo, 2021 • Bandcamp - Bruce Springsteen - State Trooper (15% slower + reverbed)
Nebraska • 1982 - The Dengie Hundred - Tamar
Brackenbank • Ethbo, 2022 • Bandcamp - Roly Porter - Al Dhanab
Aftertime • Subtext, 2011 • Bandcamp - Spiritualized - Electric Mainline II
Electric Mainline • 1993 • Archive.org - Cocteau Twins - Cherry-Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)
Otherness • Fontana, 1995 - Variant - The Setting Sun
The Setting Sun • Field Records, 2009/2026 • Bandcamp - Mika Vainio - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
Oleva • Sahko, 2024 • Bandcamp
Thank you for reading and listening. (And whoa—I just noticed this 47th episode is 47:47 which is a total coincidence, and although I'm a little spooked right now, I hope this is how the godhead has chosen to speak. Groovy far-out gestures indeed.)
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