A Dream Within a Dream
It began with a simple walk through Central Park, my eye drawn to reflections, when unexpectedly a person blowing enormous bubbles appeared. In that fleeting moment, two worlds emerged at once.
While editing, something remarkable happened: two different crops of the same bubble photo, selected intuitively, aligned perfectly. Together, they formed a fluid motion, a visual echo—a world within a world. It felt as though the photographs themselves had orchestrated their own revelation.
For me, these photos are portals. The reflections within the bubble suggest infinite nesting: realities folded inside one another. What is real becomes elastic.
I understand the anguish that moves through Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream—for me, it is the ache of loving so many things that one lifetime cannot hold them all. There are moments when the abundance of what I love feels almost unbearable, as if an infinity of passions stirs, pressing to be expressed within this finite body.
And yet, there are states in which time loosens its grip. In flow. In love. In art. With a lover. Inside an image or a sound. In those moments, presence takes over so completely that nothing else exists. The moment does not point forward or backward. It does not ask to be saved. It feels eternal. Total bliss.
Then the state shifts and time returns. What felt infinite becomes fragile again. I feel the pressure to prioritize. Perhaps this is the dream within the dream: not the illusion of reality, but the oscillation between eternity and loss. Between being fully inside a moment—immersed in its light, sound, breath, beauty—and suddenly aware that it cannot be held.
“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream”