Bardo Sketchbook

Digital film, 2025, 6 minutes

"Bardo Sketchbook" explores the idea of the Bardo as described in Tibetan Buddhism: “Bardo means gap. It refers to the interval of suspension after we die, but it also refers to suspension in the living situation.” - Trungpa, Chögyam, from the blog post, “What Is Bardo?”

I’m thinking about the pre-sleep hypnogogic state that many people experience as a way to approach this concept. It’s a state of mind where logical associations break down and unrelated ideas and images can become fused in a process Herbert Silberer called “auto symbolism,” “whereby hypnagogic hallucinations seem to represent, without repression or censorship, whatever one is thinking at the time, turning abstract ideas into a concrete image, which may be perceived as an apt and succinct representation thereof.”