For my space and materiality soft sculpture final, I want to explore ideas of the body during sleep paralysis. REM sleep, categorized by rapid eye movement, is commonly referred to as the dream stage of sleep. While dreaming can occur in other stages, REM is where the brain most actively sorts through problems, serving both physiological and psychological purposes. During REM sleep, the brain becomes energized showing levels of activity close to those of being awake. This allows the production of dreams as a mechanism for storing memories, learning, and balancing mood. Dreams serve as a means for the brain to act on a person’s thoughts while also “warming up” circuits to prepare for the waking stage. For this reason, it is often possible to analyze a person’s dreams to understand it’s connections with their real world problems, anxieties and feelings. When entering the REM stage of sleep, a person’s muscles become temporarily paralysed to keep them from acting out their dreams.
Sleep paralysis is when a dreamer becomes aware of their dream state, but their body does not physically wake up, causing a person to be unable to move their body. During sleep paralysis, victims will often continue dreaming, even with their eyes open, leading to visual hallucinations around them as they lay paralyzed in bed. Having dealt heavily with sleep paralysis, it’s a terrifying experience and can be paired with physical feelings of crushing weight on my chest or suffocating hands around my throat. It’s an experience that can’t truly be understood until you’ve dealt with it yourself, but it involves many factors that I want to interpret into visual elements of my soft sculpture piece.
When I have sleep paralysis, I experience 2 realities simultaneously, both of which I want to represent in my sculpture. My piece is a night light made of 2 main parts, an upside down pyramid resting on a pillow. The pyramid will have the light inside it and represent the psychological reality of sleep paralysis. This reality being my dream, where I continue moving through it but with this heaviness and torturous feeling of my eyes rolling back uncontrollably as if stuck on the verge of falling asleep but unable to wake fully or fall asleep fully. I’m aware I’m dreaming, but incapable of waking up, I wander aimlessly and lethargically through a dream scape in search of a means to escape. I plan to illustrate this with photographic weaving wrapping around the wireframe of the pyramid. The pictures will be of me with eyes rolling back and muscles limp. The light shining through the layers of photos will create movement, blurry and busy visuals to capture the feelings of surrealism and confusion that happen often while dreaming. The other reality I’m representing is my physical body, where I feel like I am pinned against my mattress and any attempt at movement results in shooting pains and feelings of pins and needles throughout my body. The pillow will represent this aspect, having patches of static textile with pins and needles in it.( these photos were taken after removing the pins because I needed to return them to my room mate) Sleep paralysis is a truly helpless state where both my mind and body feel trapped in two different worlds, out of my control. I want to depict his feeling of being limited by creating a soft sculpture that holds back a light and is grounded at one point in the pillow.
process
process
process
