Night photography

Our stay in Nome, Alaska, was way too short. I walked around for hours every night, trying to photograph as much as possible.

Then it struck me that houses really looked different when people sleep. The houses seemed more vulnerable. There was even intimacy. And the more intimate it felt, the creepier I become. 

I wished people somehow could project their dreams on the walls outside. But I just snapped a pic- ture and quickly moved on. 

Dolphins and Dreams

It's frustrating to photograph dolphins in the wild. You can never tell when and where they will jump, if they jump at all. But Nina managed to take this picture just after we anchored outside an open beach in Mexico. Maybe a hundred dolphins passed by, and one of the very last made the jump.

The dolphins returned that night. We could hear the high-pitched squeeking through Bika's hull. But we also heard a strange shuffling sound, as if the dolphins were breathing out just below the sur- face. They probably scared fish towards the beach.

I once shared a hospital room with a demented man. He was old but full of energy. He often paced restless around at night, with his slippers shuffling over the linoleum floor.

Still in a dream I heard the pod of dolphins. I thought it was the old man - an army of him. "Where am I?" he kept asking.

Gray Whales

Before leaving San Diego I read about Grey Whales emigrating south. Colliding with whales are one of my major fears in sailing. Especially at night, trying to sleep, I sometimes find it hard not to visualize a sudden impact.


3 am, west of Tijuana: Trying to sleep I forced my mind into something else than whales. I thought about my childhood, our new neighbors. They turned out to be vegetarians. We kids kept our distance at first, not knowing what vegetarians were, but they had a son my age who climbed into an empty trash can and got stuck. His father had to come home from work to saw him out. This happened the same winter my school dentist declared that I had eleven cavities. It was pretty much the end for me. He would be drilling my teeth until spring. I came to loath his big fat fingers in my mouth. This was before latex gloves and his nicotine stained fingers stank heavy of sour tobacco. In retrospect I would say the school dentist was bordering child molestation. His secretary was tall and skinny with ice cold hands that she seemed to put in my mouth for warmth. I was lying in that dentist chair, with tubes sucking, when a moose came into the school yard and got tangled up in the swings. Everybody expected the police to use anesthetic but they just shot it, a sharp flat crack, reverberating through windows and concrete, and later on they had to use a chain saw to cut the dead moose down, with blood squirting all over their faces.




Nina called my name. It was my watch. I dressed up in wool and rain gear, but the night was clear and still. No wind. She'd just heard some strange sounds that we soon realized was a whale breathing. But there wasn't much to do about it. We continued drifting south, deeper into Mexico.

Life on land

In the beginning, when we moved aboard Bika and sailed to the north of Norway, we both had a lot of nightmares about security offshore. We’d sleep in the forepeak and then suddenly bolt up for a quick look-out through the forehatch. We both did this at least once. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel stupid in a marina.

We had some similar problems with transition when we returned onshore this summer. I got disturbing dreams about ghosts, or black birds; the house felt like an unsafe place to be.

I was also the only one getting obsessively drunk at a family party. “What kind of person are you?” Nina asked. I honestly didn’t know. It didn’t strike me as anything odd.

I dreamt that I had this huge black bird in the house. I would chase it outside, through the open door, but then it would be another one waiting inside.

In July we were back at my sister’s place. I’d already said that I was more of a tea-person, when asked if I wanted coffee, and then, half a minute later, I reported that I was more of a cat-person, when asked if I liked dogs.

She wanted us to take care of their dog for a couple of weeks. It was a nice dog, but it seemed a bit sad. I’d walk into the woods. The dog kept looking down at the ground, towards the grass, at the tiny sticks.

I later dreamt about a dog we saw at Yale University (or in one of the surrounding buildings). I sat next to a stuffed dog in a display case, and because of all the people, neither me nor Nina noticed the dog at first. I felt bad about this in my dream. I bent down on my knees and tried to feed the dog through the glass. It was futile. I wanted to break the glass but was afraid of making a scene, although I felt certain the poor dog would die of hunger.