Saturday 28 April 2012

Welcome to my nightmare

Just before going to bed I often spend some time looking at Victorian photos of people who have long been dead. Afterwards it is not unusual for me to dream about them and sometimes a dream will turn into a nightmare. When I try to wake up from the nightmare I feel like something is sitting on my chest and I cannot move (this sleep paralysis can last for several minutes). I can never remember details of these dreams and have used a fuzzy background in the collage to represent this. The woman's face is a reverse copy of a painted tintype in my collection. It sits in my display cabinet so I see her everyday.

9 comments:

  1. Whoa...powerful and strange words in that fragment of a letter..and the reversed image is so marvelously freaky...

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  2. Ooer! Sounds and looks disturbing! (In a nice way!)

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  3. WOW! the images alone were very haunting, even more so after reading the bits of letter "you will be dead soon" "black heart". Old photos make me have strange dreams but so far they've been mostly positive ones.

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  4. Holy cow! Very dark and fascinating dream stuff here, Crafty. Where did the letter come from? I like the empty red frame in this, too.

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  5. YIKES! Nightmares they are. I used to experience that sort of sleep paralysis a long time ago. (I was convinced the apartment I was staying in was haunted.) Very scary image/story.

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  6. Thanks everyone! I live in a Victorian house and it can get a bit spooky at night, especially when I'm on my own. Creaky staircase, shadows that sort of thing. The letter originally came from the US. It is very bitter and quite nasty in places. It goes for several pages. It was written by a woman to another woman. There was no envelope.

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  7. Quite chilling. I love the half-tones and the use of hand-written text.

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