It's around 4.30am in a tiny blue-lit 70s hotel room in a mushroom-shaped concrete bunker above Sydney's CBD, and I'm struggling to sleep. Or is it that I'm struggling to wake up? I've submitted myself to an overnight sonic experience (experiment?) called The Lucid, by American artist Kelsey Lu: I will be bathed in sound for eight hours, with the prospect of having "lucid dreams".
It's one of Sydney Festival's major works.
And so it is that I wake in the small hours, convinced that I've just had a dream within a dream — both of them intense. Evidently my nervous system is having none of it: My heart rate is elevated, my skin is hot, I'm sweating. I search for an 'off' button on the yellow-tasselled speaker near the end of the bed — at this point emitting chirpy worms of sound over an ominous, deep (interminable!) electronic pulse — before deciding that this would be unsportsmanlike.
