Sleep paralysis is a state of losing a person's ablity to move or speak while waking up from or falling into sleep, being aware of their surroundings. People from around the world have documented these experiences over centuries. Even though these people come from different cultures, studies show that they record episodes with similar charateristics. Individuals who adopt an irregular sleeping pattern are more prone to this sleep-disorder. The usual sedate sensations and sounds and other stimuli we ignore in our everyday lives become significantly terrifying during an episode of sleep paralysis. While the individual's senses are intact and they are aware of their surroundings, they experience choking or a sense of pressure on them. These episodes are accompanied by hallucinations or intense fears and people have recorded seeing demonic apparitions. The disorder can also be associated with people who have depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc.

My sleep paralysis started when I was 4 or 5 (can't remember!). But I recall those undesired episodes quite well. As a child I feared all kinds of evil. My sister's bedtime horror stories added fuel to my fears. Getting older, it neither made the nights easy to handle nor was I proud of wanting somebody to sleep with me at night for my fear of the dark. Perhaps I am more scared of the darkness than of the very many diobolical beings who appear in my dreams frequently. Darkness can hide anything; it can be the most harmless of things or your worst fear, you never know. Few of the figures from the project are results of traumatic discussions with my mother who is a severe schizophrenic. Her extremely disoriented and delutional thinking has had a significant role in developing my condition over the years. The way she perceived reality altered my way of thinking as a child. Over time, my being in the real world made me curious about the underlying thoughts and fears which create these figures and dreams; this leads me to work on this deeply personal project.

Project Akam (literally, insides) deals with my sleep paralysis. Through the process of recreating my nightmares, I am also trying to overcome these fears. In the past 4 years, I have extensively noted down my hallucinations and have tried to create images resembling it. In staging and manipulating the images to talk about the spectres that populate my half-awake nightmares, I experience the kind of control over these fears that I otherwise forfeit to disorderly neurons. This is photography as therapy.