Sarah Oleksik Photography

The NHS term for sleep paralysis claims that it is normal for your muscles to be paralysed at certain times when you are asleep. Sleep paralysis occurs when the mechanism that causes your muscles to relax during sleep temporarily persist after you have woken up.

The more common explanation concludes that sleep paralysis is when the brain ‘wakes up’ before the body does. In this paralysed state people realise that they can’t move or speak, frequently these episodes are accompanied by hallucinations and the sensation of breathlessness.

 

My work has developed into representing the connection between death, sleep and sleep paralysis within my work. I wanted my images to show elements of early photography when families used to have their dead relatives photographed.  I also wanted to represent through my images the feeling of vulnerability while we are sleeping, how the experience of sleep paralysis can make us feel so scared in our own rooms. My personal experience left me sleeping with a light on for 3 years. I still continue to feel terrified when trying to fall asleep, not of the dark or of my room, but the anticipation of it happening again. What if the dark figure visits me again? I feel a sense of breathlessness, shock and my chest hurts. Where is the line between sleep paralysis and death? Could I panic myself so much because there is a man sitting on my chest that I physically die?

Sleep paralysis can last from seconds to up to 15 minutes. That doesn’t sound like long, until you imagine everything you find scary all in your room at once, coming towards you, sitting on you, maybe even with their hands around your neck choking you. It can make you feel as though you are about to –or would rather- die, than be in this horrifying situation.

Sleep paralysis is normally harmless, but most people who experience it report being terrified, deeply disturbed and scared by what they saw. Once you experience it, it’s hard to make it go away. There’s a feeling that you’re being watched over, by something that wants to hurt you. You gain a sense of vulnerability you’ve never experienced while trying to sleep before, you feel like you’re being surveyed. If you let it continue, your fear gains power over you. You then become scared to go into your bedroom, scared to fall asleep. You lose all control of what is going on.

This thought runs throughout death and sleep paralysis. You can’t control either. This is the connection which my project meets, the thought of not being able to distinguish between people who are dead and just sleeping, and how sleep paralysis can make us feel like we are dying.