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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996
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When I Woke Up
1995-1996.
When I woke up I could still see the blue sky through the ceiling.
The day before beginning my trip, I had a dream about a house which looked a lot like one of Frank Lloyd Wright's. I was inside of it, everything was very dark, and there wasn't any way of knowing exactly where I was. I assume that there were rooms and doors and windows and furniture and even other people, but I couldn't tell. I noticed a small rectangle in front of my right eye at an indeterminate distance. I could see through it and it moved when I moved my head, it was like having a special pair of glasses but with a patch over one lens.
Then, looking through the rectangle I could see the interior of where I was. It was a totally new experience, like learning how to walk. The truth is that I don't remember having to learn how to walk, so that metaphor doesn't work so well. But I bet it was something like that anyway.
There was very little that reminded me of a house, but there is no doubt I was inside one. I could see only the walls, the ceiling and the floor. The windows and the doors appeared to be cut out by hand, with a machine like a circular saw or a chain saw. There was no separation between the two floors and judging from my view through the small rectangle, my body was quite large. I came up to the middle of the second-floor windows. That means that there was no floor that divided the two floors, and it seems to me that there never was one. Therefore it wasn't a house, it was more like a fake house, like those on a movie set. Now that I think about it, there wasn't any glass in the windows, nor furniture nor people, except that my mother was there, somewhere out of sight, and not inside the house. She was far away, I knew, so far away that if I wanted her to come I would have had to shout very loudly. Everything was being revealed to me little by little through the mysterious rectangle in front of my eye.
Then everything happened very quickly. The small rectangle began to move rapidly through the space, forcing me to follow it. But that was weird, who was moving my head? I was trying to figure out things at my own pace inside that dark space and all of a sudden, it felt like somebody was behind me forcing me to look through his visual field, if that is possible, in order to see something. Even though I didn't feel any pressure on my body, no hands touching me, no ropes tightening around my arms or legs, nothing at all, I still felt like I had to follow an alien movement. Maybe I had no body, that would explain everything, but that doesn't make any sense, does it? I figure that it must have been the second cousin of my father who was behind all this, and behind me also.
My explanation for such a complicated mechanism and procedure was that somebody wanted me to see something and he wanted to make sure that the rectangular compositions that I was seeing would in no way be diluted, whatever that means. I was in no position to argue, so I decided to cooperate. During its frenetic course, it would stop violently, making me look at certain corners and certain walls, all of them were empty, of course, so I didn't know what the hell I was looking at. It seems to me that all this back and forth action was trying to link what I was seeing with the meaning of what I was seeing. It was like in a relief, where from a single viewing point, you get everything, like in Francoise Rude "La Marseillaise."
I'm not sure if I thought of that right then, but even if I did, it didn't help me very much. The reality was that my head seemed like it was going to come loose from my neck at any moment. The after-images that remained in my optic nerves were all over, overlapping each other, I was totally confused, and I couldn't see anymore. I tried to close my eyes but it was useless. I felt like Alex in the movie "A Clockwork Orange" when the bad guys forced him to watch porno movies. Even though he liked it at the beginning, due to some mysterious drug that they were giving him, after a while he hated it. He also couldn't close his eyes.
Then I realized that a second construction was taking shape right in front of the existing one. That is, between me and the movie-set house something was appearing. Still-images from my own eyes, all put together, were somehow making this happen. Due to some unknown phenomenon, the walls of the movie-set house began to break and separate, leaving wide openings to the outside. But nobody could see this from outside. Except for maybe my mother who was there somewhere, but very far away.
All these panels around me seemed to follow a sequential narrative, sticking out from the wall like in a relief. But soon it was clear that the division between the separate panels was nearly all erased, probably because of the after-images phenomenon. They were mixed up, overlapping each other. Everything looked now more like Rodin's "Gates of Hell," in a sense, where you can't see a coherent narrative.
Some panels were cut out from the wall. Now you could see the structural grid that formed it, so the actual inside of the wall was now exposed. It wasn't very likely that my mother had something to do with what was happening. I thought of yelling, asking someone to help me. Too late, I realized, the whole thing was about to fall on me, and there was no time for anything.
I still couldn't move my arms or my legs, and my head continued moving rapidly from one corner to the next and from top to bottom. Light began to enter, a lot of light, through the openings and also through the ceiling, which at the end was almost completely open like a ripe artichoke.
Suddenly my body was ejected from that place, toward the open sky. From there I could see the whole thing from a bird's eye view. The construction was falling apart, collapsing into itself. And there was my mother, standing up, contemplating what was happening from outside and pointing.
In the end, it seemed like what was being shown to me was that which cannot be shown, or that which cannot be thought. Because it wasn't the house that was there anymore, but precisely that construction that had appeared between me and the house.
Then I woke up and I wrote this list of things to do:
1 Build a house/ build a giant house/ build a model house.
2 Take pictures from inside.
3 Build another house of the same size with pictures/bigger/smaller.
4 You can cut the first house following the lines of the pictures.
5 Also you can take pictures of the second house and apply the same process, but this would be very complicated, I think.
The result:
* House
* Photos of the house
* Another house
You can put a lot or a few images to build the second house although the minimum would be one for each corner.
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