My Unconscious Mind
My Unconscious Mind is a photomedia project that reveals the secret nature of dreams, nightmares, daydreams and sleeping disorders. It was inspired by the idea that sleep can be both an escape from reality and a nightmare. Sleep disorders are more common than people believe. A bad night’s sleep is often more than a one-off experience. Insomina is a disorder that affects 30% of adults at some time in their lives. Night terrors or sleep terrors are normally associated with children to early teens. Sleep Apnea is the collapse of the upper airways. This leads to daytime sleepiness, impaired performance. The duration that a patient tends to stop breathing lasts 10 seconds or more. This depletes the amount of blood oxygen levels in the brain by 30%. Narcolepsy is the most common neurological cause of chronic sleepiness. Patients who have Narcolepsy fall under two categories. The first one being the person is unable to detect when a sleep attack will occur meaning everyday tasks become a great risk and the second. Type two, patients are able to determine when they’re about to fall under. In each case, people tend to always show daytime sleepiness no matter the type of narcolepsy they have. When suffering from narcolepsy patients can fall into REM sleep (the time when you dream in sleep) any time of the day. Which can lead to falling asleep or in some cases hypnagogic hallucinations. Some people believe that dreams are private. Some people are concerned about what others might think of what they dream about, or that in our dreams we hide the truest parts of ourselves. While others believe that dreams are designed to keep our brains working through the number of hours we stay asleep. Research still shows there’s no real answer to why we dream but the mythical wonderland we make every night even if we forget happens.
To dream doesn’t necessarily mean to sleep. Daydreams are considered to be an altered state of consciousness where we can no longer control our thoughts and zone out from our surroundings. Another example is Miro Sleeping, this can happen when your body hasn’t had enough sleep over a long period of time. Throughout the day your body will drift into sleep for 5 to 10 seconds to gain some energy back. This can happen at any time without the person being aware of it. Revealing all this through portrait photography, capturing moments of struggle that some face every night (or day for that matter) of their lives into a photo book. My goal throughout this project has been to inform people of the hidden struggles people face every night and in some cases the dangers of sleeping with a sleep disorder. Having personal experience with a close family member the lack of knowledge on the topic made it all the more frightening. Hopefully after understanding a little bit more about sleep disorders people are able to see the right people about working through their disorder.
-Maddison Bennetts- 2021
“ Sheets hot, heart yearning yet eyes never drift.”
“Blood rushing, world crashing. Everything gasps back to life.”
“ My feet are treading deep waters, sinking into the darkness.”
“ Everything stops in the dead of night. Even my breath.”
“ Darkness comes with the night, along with my monsters.”
“ It crept it’s way inside, playing tricks on my reality.”
“ It’s hidden in my dreams, but I know it’s there.”
Maddison Bennetts Capstone 2021