The art in Hypnagogia aims to show the mysterious mental and physical phenomena of sleep through the lens of Surrealist artists. Hypnagogia is used to describe the state in which you transition from wakefulness to sleep. Strange things happen in the mind and in the body in this state, such things included dreaming, hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Like there are primarily two forms or surrealist art, the exhibit is divided into two parts. The first explores the mental phenomenons that we more commonly associate with sleep and the Surrealists -- dreams. Hallucinations and dreaming are phenomena that occur when one is asleep and “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” as claimed by Freud. Writers and poets in the past have written …show more content…
These works include “The Satin Pillow” by Yves Tanguy and “Esquisite Corpse” a collaboration by Valentine Hugo, Trsistan Tzara, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Nusch Eluard. In “The Satin Pillow” there is an attempt to create distinguishable forms from the fluid like shapes. It is similar to a feature of Hypnogogia where the sleeper is affected by a form of amnesia in the hippocampus, and upon waking we are left to our own devices to make sense of the remnants of our sleepy visions. In “Esquisite Corpse” the unpredictable mish-mash of imagery creates something that is playful and unsettling at the same time in order to unlock the viewer or the artist’s …show more content…
Sleep paralysis despite the macabre nightmares and demonic hallucinations that are often associated with this particular stage it is a normal part of the human sleep cycle. Charles Dickens once wrote in his famous book Oliver Twist that “there is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of the things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure.” In the work of Sigmund Freud it is our body that prevents us from acting out our dreams and innermost desires. In sleep paralysis the body is literally frozen and our muscles weakened which prevents us from getting up and acting out our dreams whilst we are sleeping. However, the body cannot always contain the desires of the unconscious mind and parapraxis, better known as a Freudian slip occasionally occurs. In sleep paralysis experiences a range of Freudian slips or involuntary gestures. These are not limited to sudden jerks, twitches, humming, hissing, sleepwalking and more. Like what what Andre Breton described as pure psychic automatism, these gestures are involuntary and we do not have much control over them but reflect parts of our unconscious