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Nov 11, 2013 By Stephen Wilkinson (aka Bibio) Web Exclusive

Nocturnal Admittance is our series where an artist writes about their most vivid recurring dream or nightmare. For this Nocturnal Admittance, Stephen Wilkinson, who records under the name Bibio, writes about a scholarly recurring dream. Bibio is a British musician whose latest album, Silver Wilkinson, was released by his longtime label Warp back in May.

Over the last five or six years I’ve become more interested in psychology, partly out of a desire to understand myself more: my anxieties, emotions, fears, etc. Interpreting dreams is a valuable part in this. My dreams are usually anxiety dreams of some sort, some mild and some more severe. I rarely have pleasant dreams, and when I do, there’s usually something to spoil it. Like a dream where I was looking over a vast landscape of hills and valleys, completely covered with red, orange, and purple apple trees. The view was breathtaking, the most beautiful view I’d ever seen. As a keen photographer, I took out my camera to capture this view, but my camera would not work. I guess this dream could represent anxieties about not fulfilling creative desires or not being able to capture something I wanted to achieve in my art, or perhaps it was a reminder that I should live in the moment and not try to cling to everything.

The dream I’ve decided to write about was a recurring one. It was about six or seven years ago. I was living with my girlfriend and her parents. I was fortunate enough to live with understanding and patient people who let me turn their spare room into a little studio. I made music when I could, but this was usually during the day, which was a stark contrast to my days at university, where I’d often stay up making music and smoking till 6 a.m. After finishing university, I ran out of money and had no job, and I felt lost, as I didn’t know what to do next. I knew I wanted to be a full-time recording artist, but that’s not something you can jump into overnight. I left London in 2003 and moved back to my home town, Wolverhampton, with my girlfriend. We stayed with her parents for the following five years. I first had a part-time job in a local pub, but that was just an emergency job, mostly to earn money to spend on my days off in the very same pub-a dead end situation, but with some great times. I later started a part-time job in a college, where I taught music technology to 16+ year olds. It was a demanding and stressful job for an introvert like me, probably one of the most nervewracking things I have done, moreso than performing in front of thousands of people. Despite this, the job was sometimes rewarding and really stretched me as a person. I was faced with a situation where I could take on more hours at the college and therefore earn enough money to move out and get my own place—an independence I craved, but as I found the job so hard, I didn’t want to bury myself in more stress and find myself tethered to a job I could quite easily hate. Getting the job seemed like a move in the right direction, but then I felt like I plateaued. I felt like I could do something about my situation, but didn’t want to sacrifice my time spent making music and trying to get somewhere with that. This is where the dream comes in.

The dream was pretty much the same every time with maybe some slight variations. I dreamed I was at school. My school consisted of two main buildings, connected by a footbridge over a dual carriageway. The layout/imagery of my school in the dream was accurate to real life (bear in mind I left school in 1995). The dream always started out with me outside, crossing the footbridge to go to the next lesson. We often had to cross this bridge back and forth throughout the day as different lessons were in different buildings. In the dream I was the only pupil outside; everyone else was in class. I was aware that I was late for my lesson. I walked into the school but couldn’t find the room that I was in. This meant that I hadn’t been to this particular lesson for a long time, and that I’d been skipping them. It was always something ‘important’ like mathematics or science. Eventually I found my classroom and entered, late. I looked at the other kids sitting around the table with their books open. I didn’t recognise any of the work they were doing. This added to the feeling that I was an outsider, destined to fail, yet at the fault of my own. A feeling of dread came over me. I knew the exams were coming up soon and I was worrying about what my mom was going to say.

Here comes the weird part… during this recurring dream, towards the end, I would suddenly say to myself, “Why am I worried about this? I’ve got a first-class honours degree!” But the feeling of dread would soon come back.

It took a few episodes of this dream before I connected it with my ‘plateaued career,’ the fact that I was not making that important decision and taking control of my independence. The dream continued to disturb my night’s sleep up until August 2008. In fact, I could probably say that this particular dream did not come back to haunt me after 08/08/08. This was the day I met Warp co-founder Steve Beckett and he offered me a deal with Warp, my dream label. During the months leading up to this date I was edging my way in—my foot was in the door, so to speak. The feeling of very nearly being where you want to be only intensifies frustration and desperation. After I signed to Warp, I could move out, get my own place and start earning a living as an artist. The dream stopped.

Funnily enough, as I write this, I do recall that a similar dream has come back to haunt me! Again I’m at school, but this time it’s not mathematics or science or anything academic that I’m skipping… it’s P.E. But it’s only now that I’m writing this that I realise what my unconscious is telling me in this dream—GET MORE EXERCISE! One of the things that I lack from being a full-time artist.

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