IMAGINA QUE DESPIERTO
Imagina que despierto is a song inspired by the Chinese fable A butterfly’s dream, one of the stories in the Zhuangzi, among the most important texts in Chinese literature. The tale narrates the story of a man that dreams about being a butterfly, and when he awakes he doesn’t know anymore if he is a man that dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming to be a man.
I was immediately fascinated by the story and its recurrent question of reality. How can we ever be sure that this is not a dream? Are we not navigating a transient state? An awaken reverie?
What if when I close my eyes I'm actually waking up? The poem, which came to be the lyrics, circles around those questions, without trying to answer them.
It was the fact that we can't really know, and there is no way of knowing. Everything we know to be true could be a wall of smoke. And we can only accept what is to remain unresolved. This thought connected me intuitively with the figure of a constantly repeating note. Like a continuous invariable presence traveling through different sceneries, a driving force that moves forward. Walking the space in between here and nowhere; a reminder in the back of the head, so constant that you could almost forget about it. Almost.
I thought of the composition as two landscapes, the “awakened world” and the dreaming one. We start being awake, with the lyrics, the words that can define and limit. Then the repeated note takes us to a slow tempo, a counterpoint of layers, an architectural building based on phrases that come over and over again, each time with an added voice.
The reiteration sinks in the harmony. As it keeps on growing, the phrases from the first part come back, superimposing dream and reality, dissolving the line between both of them, creating the third space. And it comes back to silence, as an unresolved question.
