Sarah Mei Herman
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Hypnagogia:
“The experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep: the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep.”

The notion of sleep has been in my mind for quite some time now, arising as it does from my own personal struggle with sleeping. I somehow seem to have lost the ability to let go, to surrender to the need for sleep. This problem overshadows my life since my early twenties. Sleep is such a basic need that it has become a true obsession of mine.
Like all other animals, I have to feel safe before I can let go and give in to this most primeval of urges.
It seems that children have the abilty to completely surrender to sleep. I yearn for this natural affinity for sleep, which also was mine as a child; the sleep of complete and innocent trust. For this new project I photographed children in their most relaxed and comfortable sleeping postures. I positioned the polaroids floating in front of a secondary image, capturing moonlight in various ways as a metaphor for Hypnogogia. To me the adjoining layers underline this fragile and transitory state between being awake and asleep.