When it’s hard to fall asleep where I am, I imagine myself somewhere else. If I’m lucky, when I finally nod off my sleeping mind travels to those places. How incredible would it be if there were a way to capture and share images from that Green World we visit in our dreams?Recently, an old grad school friend told me about amazing advances at her neuroscience lab. Building on the groundbreaking work of a brilliant team in Kyoto, Beata Siatkówka and her colleagues are perfecting somnography.The process has been documented in “Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep” available inthe journal Science.There you can even see videos of somnography in action!We can now not only broadly identify what a person is dreaming about, but reproduce what they are “seeing” in their sleeping mind with astonishing accuracy and precision. We can photograph dreams!Below are some of the scenes I’ve captured from my own sleeping mind. I’ve included a bedtime story vignette I wrote to go with each. I hope these images and stories will help you find your way to the Green World on nights when sleep is elusive.Artistically yours,Loring ColvinMore info:InstagramThis post may includeaffiliate links.
When it’s hard to fall asleep where I am, I imagine myself somewhere else. If I’m lucky, when I finally nod off my sleeping mind travels to those places. How incredible would it be if there were a way to capture and share images from that Green World we visit in our dreams?
Recently, an old grad school friend told me about amazing advances at her neuroscience lab. Building on the groundbreaking work of a brilliant team in Kyoto, Beata Siatkówka and her colleagues are perfecting somnography.
The process has been documented in “Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep” available inthe journal Science.
There you can even see videos of somnography in action!
We can now not only broadly identify what a person is dreaming about, but reproduce what they are “seeing” in their sleeping mind with astonishing accuracy and precision. We can photograph dreams!
Below are some of the scenes I’ve captured from my own sleeping mind. I’ve included a bedtime story vignette I wrote to go with each. I hope these images and stories will help you find your way to the Green World on nights when sleep is elusive.
Artistically yours,
Loring Colvin
More info:Instagram
This post may includeaffiliate links.
I always enjoyed going home during college breaks. My dorm was fine, but my parents’ house would always be Home – or so I thought until I grew up, they moved, and I made a home of my own. In the dining hall before one spring break, I asked a new German friend if she had any vacation plans. “I’m seeing family near Koblenz.” “Oh,” I said, “I’ve been! Do you know the lovely castle?” “Ah yes,” she said, a warm smile splitting her handsome face, “that’s Papa’s house. You must visit us!”You’re headed home after years abroad. It will be wonderful to sleep in your old bed. It’s been so long you check a map at the tricky turns. But then you’re there, perched on a promontory in an oxbow of the Elz. For thirty-something generations, this has been your family’s home.Now to find your room among the hundred spread around eight timber-framed towers. Past the Knights’ Hall with its jesters’ heads and the armory full of crossbows and halberds. You mistakenly open Countess Agnes’ door, retreating as her ghost recounts yet again her bravery under siege. In your own room, at last, you curl up on a bearskin rug.
Manhattan’s skyscrapered canyons slice the sky into sections. Each day of the year, the sun sets behind a different building. Each day, that is, except two in midsummer straddling the solstice, when the sun settles on the horizon in line with the City’s tilted grid and its gilding light stretches the full breadth of the island.You’re standing on the Tudor City Bridge. Over your right shoulder, the UN building, that shiny slab of peaceful dreams, stands between you and Queens. The day’s last rays cast the length of 42nd Street in molten gold. Past the Chrysler Building and Grand Central, past lions Patience and Fortitude guarding the Public Library, the sun dips into the Hudson like a commuter entering the Lincoln Tunnel.The City never sleeps. But for this golden moment the bustle pauses. Everyone matches your westward gaze, gratefully receiving a solar blessing. Thus illuminated, the concrete jungle disappears, Gotham transformed to El Dorado, every stranger just a friend not yet met.
The air is different in Bhutan, 10000 feet above sea level. Taktsang Monastery is built into a cliff. The Precious Guru Padmasambhava first flew here on an enchanted tigress. Your trek begins beside a water-powered prayer wheel. Then it’s up and up stone stairs and blue pine-lined trails toward a cloud-shrouded destination. If you reach the temple, it’s a dizzying 3000 foot drop to the Paro Valley. Why even bother? If only you could ask the Buddhist master’s wife, the Fairy of Wisdom, to hail a flying tiger. But we can’t wish our way to the Green World. Every rugged step is a meditation. The journey is the point.You focus on distant chimes and the sound of a waterfall plunging to a sacred pool. Your path is festooned with moss and colorful flapping flags. Even in this remote holy spot, each breeze is a reminder that everything is connected. The atoms in every breath have circled the globe. The Himalayan rhododendrons here have Appalachian cousins. You continue upward as your previously obscured goal is revealed.
From the Chrysler Building’s shadow you walk up Lexington, under the Graybar Passage’s chandeliered arches, into the Main Concourse’s marble-clad, celestial-ceilinged bustle. Light pours in. Crowds or no, you feel the freedom of tremendous space in this Beaux-Arts poem in stone. This granite edifice, too grand to hide mere pixies among its sculpted acorns and oak leaves, instead hosts mighty Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva, personifying the accomplishment of speed, strength, and intellect that is the world’s largest train station.This is a shore formed of steel and stone where waves of new travelers roll in every minute. Every sort of character passes through. In the whispering gallery you may meet anyone coming up from the Oyster Bar: Roger Thornhill, Nick and Nora, Holden Caulfield, Clark Kent.Buy a ticket for your dream train. Fancy the Sunset Limited, Zephyr, or Niagara Rainbow? Check the departures board and your watch against the Opal Clock. Find the ramp to your platform and embark.
You silently stand beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling of a station from which you can embark to two hundred thousand destinations, each waiting to be rediscovered within the covers of an old book.Only a fool would try to name the world’s greatest book. But as for the most lovely . . . it would not be so foolish to place that crown on the Book of Kells whose brilliantly illuminated pages live here.In the Green World, Brian Boru’s harp doesn’t just sit in its thick-walled case but rises, ancient melodies stirring its brass strings.The Long Room is lined with busts of great minds from centuries past. Should they come alive, animated with their inspirations’ spirits, with whom would you choose to chat? Newton? Aristotle?Stroll with Jonathan Swift. Do you dare to adventure where his Gulliver traveled? Here in this hall redolent of biblichor, breathe in that blend of old paper and ink, open a volume, and set forth.
We typically picture the Green World solely composed of snug forest glens, perhaps alight with fairies. But it encompasses anywhere you might visit in a dream, dense cityscapes as well as country idylls.A double-barreled portal traverses the East River, a unique domain in its own right – not a true river but a drowned valley lined with Inwood marble, a classy tidal dancehall for urban seafolk. To pass through the Brooklyn Bridge’s neo-Gothic arches is to move between boroughs, between worlds. By foot, bike, or car, it takes you places.After a full night of sophisticated metropolitan revelry – dinner and a show, the grand Manhattan experience – you hail a yellow cab. The City’s no steel-souled machine; you’re exhausted yet exhilarated. Cheek against the cool window, you look back at the never-sleeping skyline as you fly over the bridge, past brownstones, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy. Tonight dream of wonders behind and adventures ahead, of engineered magnificence and whom you might meet in far Montauk.
A spiral is flat, like a watch spring or a nautilus shell. A helix, on the other hand, stretches into the third dimension, like the spring in a clicky ballpoint pen or the contrail of a jet circling into the sky. So a “spiral staircase” is really a helix. The genetic code coiled up in your cells forms a double helix - two strands twisted together.500 years before Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photographs revealed the structure of DNA, Donato Bramante designed a double helix of ramps. People spiraling up never met those spiraling down. His masterpiece inspired Giuseppe Momo’s braided staircase in the Vatican museums.How much of your essence is determined and how much a product of your own decisions? As you walk the staircase’s serpentine figure eights, old scenes repeat in your mind. Some bring warm relaxing pleasure. Other memories twist you into cold knots. It’s challenging to focus on your accomplishments while learning from mistakes and moving on.Like the ornate metal railing, you contain multitudes. No one is all good or all bad. You deserve the peace of a restful night’s sleep.
Anything that lasts long enough becomes a museum. Old churches. Decommissioned power plants. Places with space and light and years and years of history inside. Even I have become a curated collection of a lifetime’s memories.My favorite museum was once a rail terminal. A century ago, Gare d’Orsay was the world’s first electrified station and the northern end of the Paris-Orleans line. I am still transported there, though today the views are in frames instead of through railcar windows.Now you wander through levels of wonders: Degas' dancers. Manet’s bouquets. Seurat’s dots. Cezanne’s impressions. Van Gogh’s visions.My favorite is a sculpture: a striding white polar bear. May you, too, dream of riding through the halls, bear claws clicking on the stone floors, past great arched windows and great art, beneath the old station’s grand clock, still proudly marking time for travelers.
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