I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with sleep for as long as I can remember. As a child, bedtime became a place to escape. I would stay up until the early hours, getting lost in the fictional worlds I found in books. As an adult, not much has changed, except now I understand how important sleep is to your health, and how those early habits have shaped my ongoing struggle with insomnia. As I learned more about this sleep disorder, I became fascinated by the ways our consciousness is affected by sleep - or the lack of it.

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The hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are a sensory experience involving visual hallucinations that occurs during the transition of wakefulness to sleep, or sleep to wakefulness. Hypnagogic (wakefulness to sleep) hallucinations can take the form of fleeting images, sounds, body sensations or fragmented thoughts. In contrast, hypnopompic hallucinations often involve lingering dream imagery, creating a sense of disorientation as the brain attempts to transition from the dream world to conscious awareness. 

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These photographs are my interpretation of this dreamlike state - blurring the boundaries between consciousness and the dream. 

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To represent reality, I used photographs taken during quiet moments I experienced in nature. The sphere, positioned out of frame and visible only through its shadow, symbolises the self, while the structure - made from architectural foam board - represents the conscious mind. Collectively, these elements depict the in-between of sleeping and waking.