For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with The Dream. From where do they come? For what reason?
Dreams of all kinds is what separates us living things from those which are not - even single celled organisms sleep - who knows what they with their tiny brains imagine during their wind downs. Do trees dream of a gentle wind and a strong rain? Do coral dream the monoclonal dreams of a sea calm and warm, forever?
Would aliens dream?

If one does not sleep and does not dream we become unhinged, our dream become our waking life - perhaps we do not dream because we sleep but sleep because we need to dream. Perhaps it is essential to consciousness. Perhaps without dreaming we cannot think at all.

To remember is like a dream. You do not remember an event, you remember a feeling which is itself a memory of that feeling. Every time you remember you break apart that memory and re-build it again.

We share dreams, you hear about them all the time: The American Dream, The Dream of a better tomorrow, The Nightmare of history, The Dream of progress, The Dream of Jacob or of The Pharaoh or The Dream of Reality. We live in a dream, the world we see is created for us like a dream by our minds and we live within The Dream and interface with The Dream. The Dream is how we make sense of the world, it's how we perceive it. Our rods and cones and the cells in our nose and skin do not show us reality but tell it to us in the language of The Dream. When we are newborn and in the womb the veil between awake and asleep is so sheer it is as it is not there at all, life is a blur of colour and sound, unknowable except through dreaming, waking and asleep. We grow weary when we cannot dream, when we are not allowed to dream our soul becomes tired and unhinges. Without dreaming our resolve dies and our souls become small and silent.

We are told in school and in books of the indigenous of this wonderful Australia having their creation myth mantled within the Dreamtime. The time of all creation and of all one's ancestors all of one's descendants. The perpetually present dream of time. I have learnt nearly nothing of the Dreamtime but that it's only close rival to the most beautiful creation is Tolkien's songs of creation. It is the Dreamtime that is the ultimate creative force and source that all things return to. We are born, we dream, we die, we dream. Life and death themselves are kinds of dreams, are they not?

For many years my dreams were filled with geometric solids, the strongest being The Obelisk. It lives within me, like a silent orchestra, their instruments at the ready, the baton held high, not a whisper save for your held breath. I can see my reflection in it, now; silvery and pale. They are cast toward the sun as the sun cast them toward us. I can almost hear them as I walk past them in the street with the words "Lest we forget" engraved into them, as if the war they commemorate is like a dream and if we don't write it down and remind ourselves of it by reading it again and again and again and again we would forget it and shrug and repeat the horrible nightmare of the 20th century. Yes, every time I see them I feel an argute humming between my eyes and between my lungs.

So I dream them, I see them in endless gray, or through windows, slowly moving forward as if my Dream-eye is dollying in a Kubrick film, silently moving toward the chasm of unknown. I see them over the horizon like a great beast, silently watching, or underwater, causing giant waves and storms to cracking the coast of the towns I distinctly remember from my deep youth, or through the archway to the rose garden I never entered.
I dream them made from clearest crystal, growing like date palms from the cracked and dry nile river bed or fallen and crack'd and lichen encrusted like Red Woods, or peppered throughout the stone city, their mysterious humming a reminder of a past we have forgotten but which is always on the tips of all our tongues.

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This album is the work of a decade of songwriting and of production nearly as long. If you are reading this you probably appear somewhere in the album as a sonderous extra or as a main character.