(suspenseful music)
- When you wake up, you try to move, and you realize
that you're frozen, and that causes panic.
And once you start to panic, the dream gets worse.
All of a sudden, you'll see these
figures walking through your room.
You'll see, maybe a silhouetted figure
at the foot of your bed, or maybe a woman hovering
above your bed, screaming at you.
You feel like you're being choked.
You feel like you're, maybe being sucked into your bed
or levitating off of your bed by some unseen force.
These experiences are so otherworldly that you explain it
to someone, they either think you're crazy
or they think you're lying. (laughs)
There's no other way to describe it
than terrifying, paranormal, and ungodly.
(suspenseful music)
So I've had sleep paralysis for the majority of my life.
I've had it throughout my childhood.
But in my early teens, it really took over my life.
I was suffering from sleep paralysis
almost every single night.
I would hate to go to bed. (laughs)
I would go to school and not be able to stay awake,
because I hadn't slept in two days.
Until I found art as my outlet for my
sleep paralysis experiences, I didn't know what to do.
I took a mythology class in my high school,
and one of our assignments was to keep a dream journal.
Getting them onto paper,
really just started becoming my therapy.
After I have a sleep paralysis episode,
I log it in my journal.
Then I finally have, like the blueprints to my dream itself.
And I'm able to go out into the field and photograph.
So I'm driven to go out and jump in the water,
or go out during a freezing snow storm,
or even in the pouring rain for my photographs.
I use water, fire, rope, faceless figures.
My work involves a lot of different
tools and different mediums.
I'm doing woodworking to make my props.
I'm doing a lot of sewing to create,
maybe the suit, or the shirt, or maybe a dress
that my character's going to wear.
Deconstructed elements of furniture,
I'll sometimes build things from my images.
Because it's so dream related and surreal, if I don't have
a level of realism in there, people may dismiss it.
Basically when I wake up in sleep paralysis,
I'll see these figures, like walking through my room.
Or they'll be at the foot of my bed,
like trying to pull me away from my bed.
So I'm gonna model as the sufferer in the bed, here.
And there's gonna be figures emerging from the water,
trying to pull me in through the sheet and the rope.
And different symbols I'm gonna be using to express,
like that nature of being tethered to that,
that entity that's entering my room.
(breathing)
Okay.
Within my dreams, I normally see these faceless figures.
They all surround me in my bed,
and they try to pull me off of my bed.
How I like to portray them,
is these hooded figures with rope around their neck.
And it symbolizes, one, the faceless aspect of the figure.
And two, the rope that kind of feels like
I'm being choked to death within the experience.
There's no real other way to share
what a sleep paralysis experience is like,
other than to recreate it through art.
When I finally started putting my artwork out there,
people were like, "Oh, this is what you might have."
I finally stumbled upon
that Wikipedia page of sleep paralysis.
I'm like, "This is what I'm going through.
"I'm not crazy." (laughs)
I'm actually going through something
that's medical and studied.
And it gave me, like a sense of relief.
And I was able to connect with a lot of different artists,
different people around the world.
Just by seeing my work, they were like,
"Oh, I can relate to what you're going through.
"I'm going through the same thing myself."
And suddenly I felt, instead of being the one person
with this problem, there's millions of others
that are there, and I'm less alone.
And even if they're not a sleep paralysis sufferer,
they may take away something from their own nightmares.
Life was tough for me, and now
it's getting better every time I create an image.
Every time I have an experience,
I'm able to become stronger in a way.
(suspenseful music)