you weren’t made for this

this is the third time you’ve fallen out of reality

enter the abyss, home isn’t safe anymore

drag me far away

can you feel it? some day i’ll understand

did you hear it? somewhere someplace sometime else

i’m trying to get home

i don’t recognise this place

it looks like home but it’s an illusion

they’re coming, they welcome me

a haze of apparitions, duplicates of you, it’s all a paradox

don’t you ever think that there’s more than this, you’re not meant to figure it out

growing up is a myth

i need to escape through the window, my eyes are open but it’s dark

the door won’t close, im trying to turn the light on

how’s it gonna end? how do i begin and end?

distant memories, everything comes full circle in the end

it’s all real and i understand everything

I was unaware at the start of this project how invigorating it would end up being, after looking inwards to figure out what I was trying to say with my liminal-space inspired imagery, it turned deeply personal. I realised it was about my experience with sleepwalking/night terrors/sleep paralysis, that wasn’t my intention, it sort of presented itself, relating directly to my theme of subconscious, almost like my subconscious decided for me that this project needed to be about my experiences with sleep disorder.

Parasomnias are disruptive sleep-related disorders, some examples included within my project include night terrors, sleepwalking, and sleep paralysis.

This is a cathartic interpretation of my complicated, lifelong, reoccurring experience with abnormal sleep behaviours. The text/poems act as a dream journal, with the words often being derived from dreams/unsettling experiences.

I’ve always been drawn to the more surreal side of art and creating, and this project has helped me understand why, I have such vivid dreams and awful sleep experiences, often, and i’ve realised that its manifested itself in my creative practice, for many years, not just this project. In this project i’ve realised, and confronted this, and turned these terrifying, perplexing experiences into something productive and creative, which has brought me satisfaction in dealing with this daunting affliction.

I designed my process in such a way to deliberately make myself uncomfortable, starting with being barefoot in the cold and rain, trampling nettles and debris on the forest floor, to spotlighting myself in the middle of nowhere, scampering about nude across logs and fields. I wanted to use my endurance, writing the text was a cathartic expression, but so was my performance within the process of photographing, I ended each photoshoot with a thrill, the final reward of the photographs outweighed the temporary discomfort, and the temporary discomfort of my sleep experiences is always worth it because it teaches me things about myself, and it’s fascinating to see what my subconscious mind can come up with.

The overexposed, yet dark images are intended to provoke feelings of unease, accompanied by softer, dream-like, daylight images to mimic the day/night cycle. The photographs become brighter towards the end of the project, as I am waking up, out of the dream state. The text becomes longer and more literal, rather than the previous cryptic and mysterious, the poems at the end help to explain the concept and to form an ending to the non-linear narrative, a happy one, in daylight and at ease.