“When on terrible days we sleep in divine adoration of the resemblance of a quenching of thirst, the flower of the universe is the first morning of sleep, darkness no longer in a gullet, This universe I want to visit. It is the darkness that does not listen, it is the pound of paper twisted to flames; it is an interest in crucifixes and the love of those who know the pure wine.”

-Fredrick Sommer Skip Reading Poem

I Wish I Could Sleep represents a reoccurring dream from my childhood through automatic photography. The dream was cyclical, running from my home to the river then ocean then forest. I would bury myself in the dirt, hiding from an unknown Prescence, then wake up back in the house, starting the cycle over. I was running from something and to something. This project was photographed entirely without looking through the viewfinder of a point and shoot camera over the course of 365 rolls of film. My sole purpose as the photographer was to move through the landscape and react with the press of a button. The images are presented as scans of individual exposures on a film strip with fragments of the image before and after visible. The jumbled and incongruous timeline of the images represents the confusion of a dream state.

I woke up at home but it wasn’t my Home

I tried to run

I ran to the river

but it was one step behind me

I ran to the ocean

but it was one step behind me

I ran to the forest

But it was still behind me

I hid in the trees

Home followed me endlessly

I crawled beneath the roots and sank into the soil

I woke up Home