The nature of human perception is fascinatingly unclear. That so much of what we experience we experience almost unknowingly, taking in the textures of the world without clearly perceiving their construction from thousands of tiny strands is essential to the apparent ineffability of our surroundings. The heightened ambiguities of sleep and its perimeters introduce interesting questions about reality, memory and the self; if dreams are reconstitutions of past experiences spanning a lifetime of memories, taking place in split seconds perceived as hours, we enter a realm where the self’s existence as a process in time is questioned, where temporalities overlap, dilate and contract. In this miniature a soundworld of veiled sounds and briefly lucid recollections combined and blended with less clear, ‘noisy’ material echoes both an imagined/remembered nocturnal landscape and Borges’s suggestion that the ‘imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon’.
Para cruzar el sueño was composed at the University of Manchester’s NOVARS Research Centre for Electroacoustic Composition, Performance and Sound-Art in the autumn of 2009. It was premiered on 21 February 2010 as part of the Spring MANTIS Festival in Manchester, UK.