Self-Portrait:

I know a photographer who took a photograph of the bed he slept in every morning just after he got up. He then would compare the way the pillows creased and the blankets got tossed and he would also comment on the books by the bedtable and the way the light filled the room.

It seems as if there is a separate self that we leave in our sleep who lives out his nights in dreams, and the remains of this person is what we see in the way the bed has been slept in.

You can tell if it was a fitful sleep or a peaceful sleep just by how the covers are laying or the pillows are clumped.

In this image, I can see the outline of where I slept and how my head positioned between the pillows. The tones are grayish, bluish, and in the early dawn, the light seems misty, diaphanous, and the bed seems cool because of the tones.

I like the textures of the sheets and the way they seem to ripple like water and the way the pillows seem like smooth boulders in a riverbed. Darkness is the water of sleep, and our dreams are like fish. Waking is like bursting into the light in the air above the surface.

For many years, I suffered from sleep paralysis, a condition that feels like suffocation, like there is someone pressing down on me while I am half-awake. The sleep scientists have come up with an explanation of the condition and say that it is being caught between two stages of consciousness, waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness, or R.E. M. sleep when the mind is totally engaged in dreaming.

In this nether world of being stuck between states of sleep consciousness, deep sleep and light sleep, the sleeper feels trapped, hence the panic, but the feeling of being frozen and the terrible feeling of being unable to move or get up or even scream.

I haven’t had that for many years. But it is the reason that I prefer to sleep alone. I am a violent sleeper and I have had waking nightmares that I could not wake from. I used to write down all the dreams I remembered having as soon as I woke and I kept a dream journal.

I still have a file folder where I keep all these recorded dreams and it is interesting to read and to see patterns that add up to psychic disturbances, recurring images, and motifs. We are what we dream on some level.