This is a story about an artist called Anna and a surprising discovery she makes in the autumnal woods.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 46 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, a fortnightly podcast of curious tales from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host Seymour Jacklin.
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The lovely cello soundtrack for this week's episode is by Hans Christian from the album Undefended Heart, which is available from magnitude.com so if you are ready to journey with me, then I shall begin sketching and painting.
By Seymour Jacklin Anna was 20 years and 400 miles away from her body.
Standing on a cliff top, she saw the scenery all broken into triangles, scattered on the wind and happening to fall together in peaks and troughs of light and dark blue, suggesting a choppy ocean, and the little yachts like cut paper, and the great tall ships all triangles.
The sea and the ships were all collaged from the same simple shapes.
A cool draught caressed her neck and she came back to her studio with a shiver.
Morning's glow was at the window.
Was it really dawn again?
She'd been working all night.
Anna felt like a hundred spiders.
Webs had been woven over her body and her feet ached from standing in front of the canvas.
The sky was there.
She'd started with that, but as soon as she began to work on the foreground she knew that it was too bright and open, for the scene in her mind was more enclosed, burrowish, encircling.