theme no. 12 — new — the hour before dawn
Lucid
For catching a dream before it goes. Blue-black paper, moonlight ink and one amber lamp. Every page carries the moon of the night it belongs to. What you keep comes back as star charts, glass plates, night slips and moon cards.
In the app: Settings → Appearance → Lucid. It follows your account to every device, phone included.
Give a year of Haumm →Back in the house on Alder Street, except the hallway kept going past where the bathroom should be. One more door, and behind it a room with a piano nobody plays. I wasn't scared. I knew where everything was.
There was a staircase where the linen closet is. I went up and it was just the attic, only bigger, and warm.
Not just the page.
(every room, in Lucid.)
The page stays dark and still so you can write half awake; the star charts, the night slips and each month's moons live in the rooms. This is the app itself: click through the rooms.
the date
The night, not just the day.
A dream written down on the morning of the 28th belongs to the night of the 27th to the 28th, so that's what the page says, with that night's moon beside it. It's the true moon, worked out from the date, the same on every device, and turned the right way round for the southern sky. Change the page's date and the moon changes with it.
Teeth again, but calmer this time. I just held them in my hand and thought, well, that's that.
ticks and voice notes
Small moons, one lamp.
Tasks and habit days tick in small rings; tick one and it becomes a full moon. When you'd rather say it than type it, a voice note plays from an amber moon, the bedside lamp, with the note's own wave beside it and its words underneath.
There was a staircase where the linen closet is. I went up and it was just the attic, only bigger, and warm.
bookmarks
Every month, its sky.
Bookmarks gathers the pages you marked, month by month, each month with a small moon for every one of its nights. They're the sky, not a record: nothing you wrote marks or fills them. Each page keeps its own night's moon. And in every theme, On this day brings back what you wrote on this date in earlier years.
while you write
Only the menus step back.
Start typing and the menus around the page soften, like they always have. The page itself stays just as it is: the moon, the star on the rule, the paper and your words. Around it, the menus and bars are Night's, so nothing bright wakes you up. Stop, and the menus come back.
The one with the velvet seats again. Every station had my old school's name, and a conductor kept handing me tickets with tomorrow's date.
What you keep, by night.
(every piece dated by its night.)
Keep a line or a photo and Commonplace sets it as a star chart, its constellation drawn from your own words (the same words always make the same stars), a glass plate, a night slip, a moon card or a sky before dawn. Photos become plate prints, voice notes sky recordings. Re-roll for another.
Paper
Blue-black paper on a darker desk with a faint field of stars, moonlight ink, moon blue, and one amber lamp for the voice player and the cursor.
Type
Cormorant Garamond in italic for titles and the night's dates, Literata for your writing, IBM Plex Mono for the small labels.
Pieces
Star charts, glass plates, night slips, moon cards, skies before dawn, plate prints and sky recordings.
Works on
Desktop and phone, in Night's dark menus and bars. Follows your account everywhere.
Also in themes