Dream Catchers

Bedroom
Dream Catchers Sleep Lab
Dripping Springs, TX
December 2007


Red Curtains
Dream Catchers Sleep Lab
Dripping Springs, TX
December 2007

Around this time last year, a message arrived in my inbox from an old friend from Chicago, someone I hadn't seen or spoken to in nine years. And during the spring, we finally met for lunch in the East Village, and our friendship was resurrected.

My friend, an opera singer with a singular flair for drama, told me her story of a car accident, a divorce, a new love affair, a betrayal. I was recently "divorced" myself, and thus began our conversations on love and loss.

Sometimes as often as three times a week, we talk on the phone into the late hours of the night. I get these text messages, "Are u up?," and I call her back with news on my crushes and hear the latest on hers - who wrote back and who didn't write back, and what she said, and what he said, or didn't say, and what do we make of all this? Who could really endure stuff this alone, I wonder.

The night I arrived in Austin a week before Christmas, I called her from my bed in the guest room of my brother's house. It seems that some of these lonely feelings hit you the hardest around the holidays. Since I was planning to finally take some pictures, I asked her, how do you put these feelings that keep us up at night into a photograph?

The next day, after I left Red's Indoor Range, I continued my drive on Highway 290. At the side of the road in Dripping Springs, I spotted a sign for Dream Catchers Sleep Lab and pulled up to its entrance.

The rooms were dark and quiet and empty. Somber, like hotel rooms. People come to these rooms to sleep and to be studied while they sleep so they can understand why sleep is so elusive.

What are these longings and anxieties and conditions that make us restless in the darkest hours? What are we dreaming about when we are awake?