This work represents light in a transitional state, moving from sleep toward awakening. It evokes a condition in which consciousness wanders between reality and dream, corresponding to REM sleep, which gives the work its title. In this phase, perception is unstable and boundaries are fluid, neither fully unconscious nor fully awake.

The painting captures the precise moment when light begins to rise from the three-dimensional world. It is not yet the fully developed, radiant light that illuminates everything around it. Instead, it shows the instant of emergence—the threshold where light stands up from within the material world and turns toward growth.

Although this light will eventually expand, intensify, and illuminate the world, the depicted state remains focused on that fragile beginning. It is the moment of becoming, when light shifts from dormancy toward its active presence in the world.