Perceptual Isolation

This series explores my experience with a sleep disorder called sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis nightmares are visceral, physically intense, and you can’t wake yourself up from them. You are trapped in the dream world.

My nightmares used to happen infrequently, but in 2020 they began happening multiple times a night. And due to their frequency I realized that these nightmares were replaying a memory of sexual assault from my adolescence. This memory had been repressed for a long time, but I continued to dream about it. At this time I was living suspended in a fugue state between sleeping and waking life, between dream and reality, and between remembering and forgetting this traumatic incident.

To try and understand my experience, I began reading about trauma and the mind. I learned that my experience is not uncommon: traumatic experience often imprints on parts of the brain that are not easily accessible to cognition, but can be very active during sleep. There have been studies of people who don’t remember what happened to them but dream about it for decades.

In these photographs, I want to visualize the sense of suspension that I was living in, and use this as a visual metaphor for consciousness and the processing of trauma, as I experienced it. My intention with this series is to create an immersive visual world that mirrors my internal one, and pull the viewer in as a participant, in order to explore the mysterious depths of the mind and fragmentary processing of traumatic experience.