"I was reading through a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals and came across his depiction of what is now a well-known dream: “I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.”

I was taken by the dream and analysed it again and again as if it were my own. Then it reappeared in the final paragraph of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. One night I was doing some improvising and wound up singing the text overtop of this music box.

My personal take on the meaning of Emerson’s dream keeps evolving. Lately, it speaks to me of the condition of life — this requirement to eat the apple in its entirety. The beauty and the ugliness, the pleasure and the pain."

- Emily Millard

Produced by Brendan Kane
Directed by Chad Tweten
Camera Operator: Charles Roberts
Audio by Nils Mikkelsen
Filmed at Blank Page Studio

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