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My Nightmares

I had quite a few different ideas for this project but I am happy I settled on this one. For me, this piece speaks to the everyday fears my mental illness and trauma cause me. I don’t think people fully realize how much trauma impacts your everyday life. It’s not just for writing great college entrance essays. 

Trauma has followed me since I was 14 years old. It has changed how I eat, how I sleep and how I walk around this world. It forces me awake when I don’t want to be and it forces me to sleep through important moments. It’s the ultimate double edged sword.

I am working on uploading the video of this piece in its entirety, but as it is 6 and a half hours long, it is taking a long time to fully upload and I am not sure if Cornell Wifi will even permit it.

In making my nightmare soundscape, I gathered a list of triggering and unpleasant noises and sounds, and layered them over top each other. I did my darnedest to not hear the whole thing through and to this day, either because of trauma or exhaustion, I cannot remember the order of the noises. I was able to make this impactful, while still creating it personally to mess with my head.

This piece was something of an experiment to me. I don’t know how I expected to react but I thought there were going to be a lot more panic attacks and a lot less sleep then I got. In the piece, I was able to sleep and seemed to wake up only during certain specific sounds, like my little sister screaming, or the sounds of a mother finding her child dead. Beyond that I was decently restful. I think this speaks to an even more powerful representation of my pain. This nightmare soundscape didn’t stop me from sleeping because it’s what I sleep with in my head every night. 

The critiques I received were pretty predictable, this isn’t the ideal situation to display this piece. I would have loved to have someone else create the soundscape for me and I’d love to do this in a gallery for a week long presentation. Regardless of it being not ideal, this piece expressed a concept that was still very important to me to express and I’m desperately glad I got the chance to. 

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