Bardo Sketchbook

3 minutes, 2025

Bardo Sketchbook explores the idea of the bardo as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a gap between this life and what comes next and an entire world of psychedelic visions and experiences as the ego breaks down.

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.”

Bardo Sketchbook combines vacation footage, natural imagery, and studio experiments with a small mirror as a way to practice approaching the mystery of existence and mortality.