For the past several years, my creative practice had to go quiet. Navigating a brutal four year storm of a divorce, a master’s program, herniated disks from a car accident, and a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis left me with little energy to create. But as I return to regular creating for this October challenge, I am anchoring my daily photographs in an exploration of my own mind through dream research.
As the reader goes through my Media of the Mind and Techniques of the Surrealist posts this month, it is worth noting that this is the specific brain I am using for these self-experiments. My results are entirely personal, and they may not necessarily be duplicated in a different brainscape.
As a clinical researcher, I tend to look at the world through data, biology, and systems. As an artist, I translate those systems into small scale fabricated photography. When I look at my own intersecting diagnoses of MS, ADHD, a history of PTSD, and suspected Autism, I find myself wondering how this unique neurological ecosystem might shape my dream world.
Lately, I discovered a vital piece of my own sleep architecture: I sleep incredibly hot. Because of neuro thermoregulation issues heavily tied to MS and neurodivergence, my body seems to struggle to drop its core temperature to open the gate for REM sleep. Instead, I spend the night feeling trapped in a physical pressure cooker. The gate only appears to open in the final hours of the morning, just before my alarm goes off.
This could create an explosive neurological phenomenon that dictates my entire creative practice.
The Conflict of Form: ADHD Chaos vs. Autistic Monotropism
When the REM gate finally opens right before morning, my brain might be experiencing “REM rebound,” which is a rapid rush to process a full night’s worth of emotional data in a fraction of the time.
Because of my ADHD and history of PTSD, this could explain why my dreamscapes often feel intense, hyper vivid, and chaotic. My amygdala might be firing rapidly, throwing me into cinematic, fast paced narratives. Yet, filtering through a baseline of suspected autism, this chaos frequently clashes with a distinct monotropic focus. Some mornings I wake up from a sprawling, anxious epic, while other mornings, the dream is a beautifully sparse, hyper fixated vignette centered entirely around a single, geometric object or isolated concept. Like this morning for example, the entirety of my noted down dream is “cooking ravioli.”
The Somatosensory Leak: Heat as a Narrative
Because my body is physically struggling against heat all night, it is possible that ambient stress bleeds directly into the subconscious script. The brain may attempt to rationalize physical discomfort by weaving it into a visual narrative. This could be why I frequently find my dreams taking place in heavy, claustrophobic environments, such as a repeating dream I used to have of being trapped inside an abandoned water park at night.
From the Lab to the Camera: Waking at the Threshold
While MS related neurological fatigue can often cause “dream amnesia” where the memory of the dream evaporates upon waking, my delayed REM cycle might actually create an artist’s advantage. Because my only real REM sleep happens immediately before my alarm goes off, I am ripped directly out of the dream state and into conscious waking life.
The threshold between the dream world and reality feels completely shattered. The visual details, distinct textures, and specific lighting choices of my subconscious are still fresh and ringing in my conscious mind when I open my eyes.
My current photography is an effort to document this compressed gate. By fabricating miniature, small scale scenes, I am trying to visually capture what it might feel like to be a brain waiting all night for a single, fleeting window of expression. It is a space where clinical data meets a vulnerable, surreal reality, and I am looking forward to sharing how this research manifests in my images throughout the rest of October.
Sources
- Can Multiple Sclerosis as a Cognitive Disorder Influence Patients’ Dreams? (Study evaluating how demyelination and cognitive load impact neural consolidation and dream amnesia): PubMed Central / Springer
- REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Associated with Acute Brainstem Lesion in Multiple Sclerosis (Clinical tracking of how neurological lesions in the pons disrupt muscle paralysis during REM sleep): Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine
- Temperature Sensitivity & MS (Medical data detailing neuro-thermoregulation issues and autonomic nervous system dysfunction, such as Uhthoff’s phenomenon): National Multiple Sclerosis Society
- ADHD and Vivid Dreams (Research detailing the relationship between dopamine/norepinephrine variances, baseline nervous system hyperarousal, and cinematic dream states): Sunfield Center
- ADHD Attention Difficulties Linked to Intrusion of Sleep Waves During Wakefulness (Neurological tracking showing how slow sleep waves can physically intrude into the waking neurodivergent brain): Paris Brain Institute
- Dream Content Analysis in Persons with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (Sleep laboratory research documenting shorter, object-oriented, and monotropic dream structures in autistic adults): PubMed / Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
- How ADHD Disrupts Your Sleep Stages (A breakdown of psychiatric frameworks detailing how conditions like clinical depression and ADHD alter REM latency and sleep architecture): Simply Psychology
- PTSD and Sleep Disturbances (Clinical review of how trauma blocks ordinary memory processing, locking the amygdala into hyper-vigilant, replicative nightmare loops): American Psychological Association.
What about you?
Every brainscape is completely unique, and I would love to hear about yours. Does your mind build chaotic, cinematic dreams, or do you tend to hyper-focus on specific, minimal vignettes? Or, maybe you don’t remember your dreams at all. Chapter 8 of the current dream book I’m reading promises to help with that. I will be sure to update you on the how to.
Drop a comment below and let me know how your own brain constructs its dream worlds.
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