Hypnopompia

My Dream, My Bad Dream, 1915. Fritz Schwimbeck

After a 14 hour show day spent mostly talking with people about mostly darker art, we got home and I crashed hard, and, as I tend to do, stirred at 4 in the morning. In the dark, in the quiet of that between place of consciousness and sleep, unsure if I was in dreamland or the waking world, I suddenly got the distinct impression I was not alone, and then that someone or something was standing on my back.

My eyes shot open and I was definitely awake, but I couldn't move, or even take a breath. I felt my heart pounding on the walls of my chest, a claustrophobic trying to break the cage. Locked in this unresponsive vessel, I summoned all my will to move, and like a rusted Tin Man, slowly twitching and then all at once my limbs came free, and I gasped.

Our bodies do all kinds of strange things at times, but this was particularly unnerving.

Sleep paralysis. My first, only, and hopefully last experience.

Nightmare, 1781. Henry Fuseli

It's been described pretty consistently throughout the ages, but few quite distilled the dread like Henry Fuseli. His first public display and moneymaking piece was a spectacle of a specter, and it seems likely his infatuation and eventual rejection by a ladyfriend led to the image - a troll-like creature sitting on the chest of a woman, a ghost horse with milky eyes peeking in on the action. The concept was redone multiple times by Fuseli himself, as if he was fighting the demon…

Nightmare, again, 1791. Henry Fuseli again.

Then by his friend Nicolai Abildgaard, who went with more women more nude, with a more mischievous, less humanoid imp.

Nightmare, 1800. Nicolai Abildgaard (S&H restoration)

Ditlev Blunck did the same decades later - a bit more interieur and au naturelle, almost Romanesque realist version, full of object symbolism, with a strange little bunnycat doing its best to be the monster.

Mareridt, 1846. Ditlev Blunck (S&H restoration)

The perception change over the centuries from the whispered warnings, the concerns for an innocent and helpless woman's virtue being besmirched by her forbidden desires and tempted by an incubus, to the current more clinical parasomnia paranoia is fascinating to see, but the woe remains: a REM wrecking reminder of our strange daily dormancy, and our vulnerability because of it.

"That could mess with my rest", one show attendee told me. 

Or, as another in another city said, in fancier parlance: 

"My sleep is f***ed."

- M