We Live Inside a Dream

We Live Inside a Dream is a visual exploration of liminality as a threshold state: an unstable yet generative phase of suspension, where transformation becomes possible, familiar structures dissolve, and meaning emerges in fragmented, shifting forms.

We Live Inside a Dream explores liminality, in-between states of suspension where perception becomes unstable and reality appears fragmented, delayed, or doubled. The work moves through thresholds: between presence and absence, body and image, consciousness and its fading edges.

The project began as a personal response to my mother’s encounter with altered states of consciousness. Her recollections from that time, dream-like fragments, fluid images, and visions hovering between memory and fantasy, resembled Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) as described in transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies. Emerging from a deeply embodied and relational experience, these accounts, situated between scientific observation and mystical narrative, opened a space for questioning: what does it mean to exist in-between?

Rooted in the personal yet informed by research, the work moves between documentation and inner landscape, between scientific reference and emotional metaphor. Scientific thought informs the work as a way of looking rather than explaining. Ideas of observation, uncertainty, parallel states, and phenomena that can be detected but not fully grasped echo through the images, not as illustrations but as underlying structures.

Moving between the intimate and the impersonal, the seen and the felt, the photographs inhabit a suspended space where time slows, boundaries soften, and identity loses its shape, while meaning emerges gradually, like an afterimage still forming. Liminality here is not merely a passage but a state of becoming, a dissolution that holds the potential for renewal. The project invites reflection on transition, vulnerability, and the invisible forces that shape our sense of reality, offering the unknown not as something to fear, but as a space for transformation and reconnection.

This project is a candidate for PhMuseum Days 2026 Photography Festival Open Call

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We Live Inside a Dream by Danae Panagiotidi

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