In Between

Lately, I've been struggling with sleep issues and experiencing peculiar fears surrounding it. I fear sleeping because I feel like I lose touch with reality and control over the situation, unsure of what might occur while I'm asleep. I have a phobia where if something is beyond my control, I start to panic. So often, when I try to sleep with these thoughts of sleep anxiety, my body and mind engage in a struggle—my body yearns to sleep while my mind and feelings of fear resist. Sometimes, I have fleeting visions when I'm neither fully asleep nor awake, as if entering an 'alternate world,' causing me to startle awake, gasping for breath with a pounding heart. When I find myself there, I encounter visions akin to dreams—always something eerie and frightening, occasionally unreal and incomprehensible. Sometimes, there's a hint of familiarity, but everything I see there somehow relates to me—my fears, my health, my childhood traumas, my present traumas, my reality, my relationships with certain people or things. Often, I don't even remember what I saw there, yet some feeling lingers. This collection is about that world, about how I perceive it, about how I feel it. I've tried to write down fragments to remember what I saw later. Creating these images has been therapeutic for me, a journey of self-discovery. Plus, now I have images that serve as a narrative of sorts for me.