Misery in the dream.

Valya 1

Misery is a match that never goes out.  - Thomas Huxley

Moon 1

Here are some of my dark images from my sessions with Moon and Valya.  Tough to look at, work with, or even title.  Interesting how Valya and Moon took their feelings and emotions into different areas.  Thanks to both for your hard work on this hard subject.

These images represent the crepitus aesthetic of my night terrors.  In them, they are how I see and sense these horror dream.  Sometimes I am the observer, the victim, and on rare occasions, the persecutor.  With all, the grisly feel in the dreams are close to the content of these photos.

I want to say it was my direct intent to make these photos with Valya and Moon as a concept photo of my nightmares.  It wasn't.   I was hesitant at first to use the projected image because it looked disturbing.  After talking with both models, we decided to work with it.

The Original

I chose this image a while ago as one I could project onto them.  You may recognize it as one I took at a local abandoned building on a closed naval base.  The look and feel of that environment has a creepy sense of familiarity and closeness to me.  Something has made me return to that location four times to photograph in it, including once with Mollee.

Valya 2

Maybe my subconscious mind made the connections for me to use that image and project it onto the models.  Once I saw how both reacted and worked with it, I knew I was discovering something important.  It wasn't until I started working on the images did I begin to realize why this was important. 

The first time I looked at these photos in their raw form, I was disturbed.  I even looked away a few times and closed Lightroom.  I felt a personal connection to the models, the scene and the disturbing concepts of the captured moments.  After working with the images, I gave up hopes of beauty and decided to make them convey misery and other dark emotions.  I soon discovered that what made these feel personal and connected was that I live this type of scene almost every night.

Moon 3

In these dreams I usually feel helpless and at the mercy of others, or helplessly watching others go through the same misery.  These dreams have deep colors, gore, guts, and sound.  I hear joints popping and grinding (crepitus) and the soft moans and sobs of despair.  In all of them, the dream keeps progressing so slowly until a semi-conscious part of my mind tells me to wake up and say, "Get the fuck out of my dreams."  I usually fall asleep again and the cycle repeats, but is shorter as I make the same realization.  After a few repetitions, it goes away and I either dream about pleasant things, unimportant things, or they are completely forgotten for the rest of the night.

Moon 2

Valya 3

I am starting to honor these dark patches of my psyche and try not to bury them as the tortures of the night and only the night.  They are a part of me.  My subconscious is trying to tell me that I need to do something with them.  Maybe it will help heal me.  Maybe it will make some ugly art.


 PHOTOS NOTE:  I left these as large "clickable" links for now so you can see them big.  Please look at both models' eyes.  They tell volumes.

Post Script - Ok -- I guess they were too much. Tuesday (090710)

Valya 4

Moon 4