Sleep Paralysis, Somnambulism and the Uncanny - 2

The “familiar”, the “homely” – “Heimlich” in Freud’s original discourse – in this case literally the home of the dreamer, the bedroom, is rendered “unfamiliar” and distinctly “unhomely”, “unheimlich”, by its seemingly real and terrifying daemons and assorted creatures from inner space.

In “Tiny Pain”, the hallucination is produced by the use of animation – rather than the use of a superimposed filmed images of a real object or person- this aids in replicating the “other worldliness” of the image, in this case an ever increasing vortex of force which increases in size as the subject’s paralysis spreads, and seems to be moving ever closer to her.

In Sleep Paralysis then, the suppressed contents of the unconscious literally escape into reality and become “manifest”, as it were, no longer suppressed, but instead liberated and able to terrify and threaten the subject, seemingly in the real world.  The concomitant to Sleep Paralysis is the phenomenon that results due to an absence of REM paralysis: somnambulism.  Page has explored this condition in two further works; Unknown Disturbance, shown at the Trafalgar Hotel, 2004 and Sleepwalker, 2005.  Unknown Disturbance, shown at the Trafalgar Hotel, London, as a two-screen slide projection, reveals a sleepwalking female child wandering the corridors of the very same hotel.

In Sleepwalker, Page explores this state with a greater depth and elaboration.  The film is conceived to be projected onto adjacent walls, in the corner of a gallery. On the right – hand screen of the film we see a man asleep, he gets out of the bed and begins to sleepwalk, engaging in a set of bizarre actions as he moves through the rooms of his house and then out into the streets of the city.  By way of “explanation” the left-hand screen shows the same man, but this time it depicts his dream, which is occurring in parallel with his sleepwalking episode.
 
The settings for both the dream-a dilapidated and abandoned building of vast dimensions- and the “real” environment of the right-hand film-run-down, graffitied parts of the city at night-refers back to an earlier series of photo works, “Topologies”,(2003), where the city acted as a metaphor for the dream.  Repressed parts of the city stood in for the unconscious; viewed from the vantage point of a passing train one could see parts of the city that the town planner did not intend us to see; the grey zones, gaps, wastelands, and ghettos.

This uncovering of the hidden functioned as a trope for the repression of social memories, the visual erasure of the environments of the poor.  Those same locations became the mise-en-scene for Sleepwalker.

The physical body of the somnambulator acts in the manner of an automaton, animated, as it is not by the conscious volition of the subject, but by the unrestrained forces of the unconscious mind.  This relates to an early example of the uncanny as given by Ernst Jentch-whose essay on the subject preceded Freud’s – that of the uncertainty as to whether an animate object was really alive, and conversely whether an inanimate object was truly non-sentient. 

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