For a few months some years ago, I would wake up to see swarms of bees buzzing around the corner of my bedroom near the ceiling. Sometimes it was hundreds of beetles crawling there, or tadpoles or flies. As real as they appeared at first, regardless of whether I shook my head or blinked, they would fade away within a minute of waking. They always stayed in the corner of the room, as if respecting an appropriate distance, present and real enough to be there, but not threateningly close. Always, that is, except for once when a giant transparent spider crawled across the pillow towards my face. But by then I knew what it was and could enjoy with fascination the vivid power of the mind to create a perception of something beyond reality, a strange and intriguing, if uncommon side effect of a medication I was taking.
Sometimes, checking symptoms on the internet can pinpoint an accurate diagnosis rather than a deluge of life threatening conditions. In this case, I found that hypnopompic hallucinations, brief visions upon waking, particularly of insects, was a rare but possible side effect of the medication. As one person commented online, “Doctors should warn their patients that this can happen, because it can be very frightening.” I guess so! Luckily, I could experience what was clearly a hallucination all the while solidly in my conscious and sober mind observing without fear and with the full knowledge that it was a trick of the mind.
The moments between sleeping and waking can be, even without the side effects of medication, a strange and wonderful place of semi-consciousness. A morning dream, just under wakefulness, brings a certain colour to the day, unconscious meanderings that ask for consideration. And the evening’s last thoughts slip sideways into a dream, and then into dark. But there is always the moment between.
Thomas Edison took advantage of this moment, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep called hypnagogia, as a way of tapping into creative thought to solve difficult problems in his work. He would nap while sitting in an armchair, his hands holding steel balls above metal saucers on the floor. In the moment when sleep would cause his hands to loosen their grip, the balls would drop onto the saucers and wake him, allowing him to record his semi-conscious thoughts in the moment of falling asleep.
Some time ago, I was working my way through my online photo archive, thousands of reference photographs, travel, family events, and art documentation. I started noticing the occasional accidental photo, a blurred, tilted or misdirected photograph, a moment captured with the accidental click of the shutter. Or the photos where the camera’s automatic setting got the focus or exposure wrong. At first I started deleting these pictures, but soon found that they held a mystery or intrigue that my intentional photos lacked. A vaguely decipherable image, an abstracted moment, a moody interior captured or imagined in an otherwise discarded photograph.
The images became a collection of photographs, printed just as accidentally composed, but abstracted with the blue tones of the cyanotype process. They hold hints of a place, or person, or object, but in their abstraction, they create a distance from the original moment of exposure, the intended subject and composition left for the photographs before and after in the archive. The moment between capturing an ambiguous dreamlike view of what would otherwise be unremarkably obvious.
It reminds me of those moments, if you give them some attention, where you overhear a fragment of conversation as you pass people in the street, or the sideways glance from a bus as you look out the window. I once sat alone at a cafe waiting for friends and became aware over a few minutes, of the couple beside me, their hushed angry tones, then a woman alone, then an uneaten tub of ice cream melting at the empty table. Or the time on the bus, glancing out at a man standing on the sidewalk holding a small suitcase in each hand, first lifting one then the other up in the air, repeating the scene over and over until I had passed. Each brief encounter a thin slice of a complex story of a life.
It is like a deja vu experience that stops you for a moment, sure, in a new place or experience that you have been here, through this once before. Or a brief loss for words, a tip of the tongue lapse of memory for language so familiar it is baffling that it doesn’t come to mind. Or a memory so vague it has become unmoored from its place in a story.
A moment in between can be a place of passing, a psychological transition, a corridor between one place and the next. Perhaps a tunnel, perhaps the turn of the head. A quiet reflective pause or maybe a sudden blurring pivot.
We have a new understanding of in between with the Covid pandemic. There will be a before and soon, an after. The in between has been unique for each of us, but for many it has been an interior type of isolation. These cyanotype photographs were created during this time, in the dim light of a darkroom. They reflect a kind of uncertainty, an unpopulated unsettled view of sideways glances and unanswered questions that this time has held. But they also reflect the calm closer look and reevaluation that this disruption of time and routine has afforded.
Like the drop of Edison’s metal ball that woke him from his first dreaming thoughts, like the illusory bees buzzing me into wakefulness, like the fleeting chance encounter, and like the accidental click of the camera’s shutter, there are overlooked moments worthy of consideration. What is real and what is illusion? What is significant and what is just a passing flight of fancy or dreamy whim? What more would I see if I looked the other way or around the next corner? What is passed by as insignificant when it holds what really matters? A moment between stretches wide the small distance between two points leaving infinite space for what is possible, what is forgotten, what is real and what could be.
