Phantasmagoraphobe from Coaxial Chaos by Watabou
Dreams can offer unique and vivid insight into aspects of our experience that may otherwise be easy to overlook, and can serve as catalysts for thoughts about ourselves based on situations we hopefully never have to find ourselves faced with in reality. All insight in the world about your past decisions mean nothing by themselves, though, even if they’re kept in mind for the present or the future. The chaos and disorder around us evolve as we do, of course, but that’s because we have a strong tendency to feed off of them in a similar way to how it can feel like it’s feeding off of us. Past decisions solidify what we experience, and often experience is all we have to go off of. While that experience is absolutely a valuable resource, it’s inevitably molded by disorder and caters to specific circumstances, which then become recursive in situations where experience is the primary source of action. Ever felt like you were trapped in a dream?
I can personally recall periods where for months at a time I felt too overwhelmed by my circumstances to react any other way besides what I’d learned from experience alone. Though in a lot of these periods, dream stimuli have been able to play a pivotal role in redefining my own value for my actions. For example, this song depicts a dream scenario where I was consciously aware that I impulsively killed someone, which would obviously be impossible to work past/reconcile in reality. It felt meaningless and morbid throughout the entirety of the dream, but upon waking and reflecting on that mindset I felt more connected to the gravity of my decisions and how significant the culmination of my experience is in the maintenance of myself and the wellbeing of those I find myself faced with.
Tracklist
| 10. | Phantasmagoraphobe | 3:30 |
Lyrics
Ever felt like you were trapped in a dream?
Surrounded by
Things that just make sense to everyone else
But feel way too weird to talk about aloud
Loosely understanding
That this can't be right
Vividly recounting
Last night in a dream I killed a man
He was innocent so I ran away, hid the best I could to no avail
I was with a friend, we were both scared
Neither of us wanted to be there
We came to our senses but nothing had changed about
Where we still stood
in guilt nor law
This was our hell
But the landscape was so beautiful that night
What peculiar juxtaposition
Straightforward contravention on my mind
With the wind blowing beneath iridescent light
The burden of guilt of a dreamed-up death still mine
The desert landscape here teeming with life
Circumstantially all my efforts to affirm my sincerity seriously fall shy
Progressing moment by moment into such unsustainable peculiarity
Wake up and look around to see no sign of desert or no dead body by my side
(No dead body by my side)
Renewing my sincerity, enhancing my clarity and comprehension of my
(Comprehension of my)
Cognitive lapse and the affected actions that lend to explaining why
(Explaining why)
It seems to me when I’m trapped in a dream, chaotic will always arise
But now that’s past and now I understand
That struggle supersedes action
Absolute outcome unpredictable
Until disorder overflows
Energy’s finite, but I still feel fine
But that means I’ve got to decide
In dreams and in life where do I go?
I’m such phantasmagoraphobe
Images with blinding speed dart
At me in sequence
I hope that this is just another dream because I don’t recall
Letting my impulses take control of me that soon after creating
A resolve
To better accept where I am
And the abilities I have
As a basis for taking
Back what I have given myself blindly
When I didn’t deserve it then
I’ll reclaim the
Points of my youth I never even knew had a purpose
Other than forcing me to choose a side
Every decision strengthening divides
Internal injuries inflicted by
Conflicting opinions that don’t matter
They don't matter
But they still exist
So I’ll retract the damage that they did
It won’t be easy
But nothing good is
I resolve to overcome being this
Putrid somnambulist
Credits
License
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
Watabou is the amalgamation of extensive electronic programming, punishing physical externalization, subconscious realization, and constructive manipulation of myself and my art. It is the peak of my artistic externalization and I hope you understand and enjoy it for what it is.