Woke is the past tense of wake, as in

“Rouse ye the dairyman, that we may sup on fine Stilton and Wensleydale ere the day grow old”

“Aye, he woke up betimes, so I’ll harry not his goodwife this morn.”

or in the first line of “Shadows in the Rain” by The Police, which Sting so aptly “covered” on his first album (the one with the best band he’d ever assemble: Kenny Kirkland, Omar Hakim, Branford Marsalis, Darryl Jones, et al.)

“Woke up in my clothes again this morning

Don’t know exactly where I am”

and other more ordinary uses, such as “I woke up at 7:30 this morning, so I’m ready to go.”

Somehow, the linguistic ne’er-do-wells (I think that’s the plural form; “ne’ers-do-well” seems totally wrong) turned it into a pejorative in the last few years. As near as I can tell, it’s supposed to refer to a rather ordinary person with a normal sense of ethics—quite a perverse idea in this day and age, if you ask me. (But you didn’t, so I offered.) This spawned further linguistic perversions, like this excerpt from a speech in which a politician claimed the need to leave a political party that was “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Excuse me while I get a lozenge.

This piece has nothing to do with any of that pejorative nonsense. It’s just a repeating ostinato pattern that gets worked through in a variety of ways. The visuals here seem to have something to do with insomniacs.