From the recording LP12 HORIZON IX
“Cities Made of Sleep” depicts a dreamlike, unstable world where urban landscapes shift, dissolve, and rewrite themselves, blurring the line between memory, illusion, and reality. Streets vanish, towers turn to grass, oceans appear and fade, and even names and maps cannot hold their place, suggesting a city that is alive, fluid, and indifferent to human attempts at permanence. The inhabitants, numbed to the constant transformations, accept the unreality as normal, while the narrator resists, trying to hold onto meaning in a place where nothing endures.
The final twist — “it’s not the city that’s dreaming, it’s you” — reframes the disorientation as a projection of the self, making the city both a metaphor for the subconscious and a mirror of fragile human perception.
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
I walk the road I’ve walked before,
But now it ends in someone’s door.
The stairs that once led down to trains
Now open up to fields of rain.
The air smells faintly of the sea,
Though it’s been gone a century.
Every wall has learned to bend,
Every street forgets its end.
[Pre-Chorus]
In the quiet hum beneath our feet,
The city’s pulse has changed its beat.
[Chorus]
Cities made of sleep,
Where the rules no longer keep.
Every turn’s a waking dream,
Nothing’s ever what it seems.
[Verse 2]
I see a tower made of glass,
But when I blink, it’s only grass.
An ocean floods the market square,
Then fades like it was never there.
The people smile, they don’t complain,
Their memories already trained.
They call this change “a minor glitch,”
But the map is burning stitch by stitch.
[Instrumental Passage: A looping guitar motif drifts in and out of key, layered over a slow 5/4 drum pattern, giving the sense of reality bending. Synth swells mimic distant whale calls.]
[Bridge]
I try to mark the ground I cross,
But every sign is quickly lost.
The walls erase my written name,
The city dreams, and I’m its game.
[Chorus]
Cities made of sleep,
Where the rules no longer keep.
Every turn’s a waking dream,
Nothing’s ever what it seems.
[Outro: The final minute layers soft, detuned piano notes over deep, heartbeat-like bass pulses. A faint voice — the same from “Voices from the Lattice” — whispers]
It’s not the city that’s dreaming… it’s you
It’s not the city that’s dreaming… it’s you
It’s not the city that’s dreaming… it’s you