Thought fed through the machine of cognizance end up tinted with linear interlinings that cloak the semiotic potential of the morpheme rather than augmenting it, and it is in the relinquishment of the rigidity in consciousness to the atmospheric subconscious that one could fully tap extraordinary formulations of meaning. In Steve Carll’s Hypnopompic Diaries Books I & II, Carll sublimates the conscious ego for the creative mine of the liminal between dream and wake, utilizing notative methodology that captures the free-flowing dreamthink remnants that tend to briefly cling to you in the haze of first wake, as if plucking fading stars from the sky of a rapidly breaking dawn. It is the auric permeability of the creative impulse that is singular to this cognitive margin, that imbues the art with a specific conceptual fluidity accessible only through psychic depths: raw neural firing twined into poetic structures, an experiment in inventional purity.

Within the recognitive process, human recall exhibits high conceptual porosity. The subconscious becomes saturated with consequential abstractions reflective of the waning everyday, and in neurological delicacy, atomistically links dissociated ideated forms into meaningful new geometries. However, these configurations are generally smothered by the conscious ego, whose waking linearity sublimates depth and can only translate gross approximations, as the average line does a scatterplot. Deep consciousness exists in a gaseous freedom of movement and it is in its crystallization where pure meaning proliferates. Accession entails a weakening of the barrier, and the most common interstice is the space after wake but before consciousness, at the tail-end of dream, when thought is a primally wordless extension of being. Living slant in the image, there is so much lost in the simple act of definitive articulation, in perpetual representation. Hypnopompic Diaries is an operation in unobstructed accession, seeking to bridge the semiotic gap between interior and exterior, and in process constructs a profound dreamscape out of an increasingly absurd reality. 

Understanding how both lockdown isolation and COVID infection can alter the basic states of consciousness, Book I, entitled Pandemic Summer, mirrors its form in its subject, the arresting daze of 2020’s global contagion translated into associative constructions blending political satire, rhetorical profundity, and isolatory introspections, paralleling real life event progression. With sardonic witticism, Carll wades the reader through a stagnant lockdown, particling social commentary within playful textual experiments and recording societal absurdities in forms at times as fragmentary as the self that witnessed them. Book II, Half-Dreamt, regains some sort of structure with its chronological dating, yet there is still an overwhelming sense of temporal fog, of moving through space as if weightless and lifted. The semantic associations and alliterative sequences lend to a sense of proscribed looseness, of “celebrating catastrophe,” embodying a cavalier morbidity characteristic of those death-adjacent that dominated the pandemic cultural zeitgeist. Cycling grief through a wry laugh, Carll accesses a specific form of plagued surreality, and it is within the implication of this methodology that captures me. 

In attempt of direct connection to the sublimated psyche, there is an unavoidably confessional nature to the collection. Underneath, or perhaps bolstered by, the poet’s tone remaining satirically copacetic in the face of tremendous social upheavals, there is tacit admission of burning with the world. That the world’s fires have engulfed even the most interior of cognitions as to be recycled in dream and carried formlessly into the mind’s dewy morning. A penetrating schema wherein so racked by environmental hostility the only choice is to evolute surrealities that can parse the despondency of bearing powerless witness. Inefficient governance, the languishing needs of the family, the maddening absurdity of experiencing apocalypse while working from home–whose subsequent branches produce somnambulent foliage, it is nothing if not cerebrally rooted. 

Hypnopompic Diaries is an incredible collection of meaning skillfully extracted from a rare, deep interiority. It is a pioneer in the poetic memoir that masterfully annotates a global pandemic with an endless modern acuity, and balances sociopolitical analysis and poignant introspection within refreshingly experimental structural frameworks. Leaving you like a dream, yet still you remain in its hypnotic wake.