Nightmares offer a rare opportunity to understand fear through the compositions of a sleeping mind. Sometimes we understand nightmares as related to an event or problem in our waking lives, but other times they seem to come out of nowhere.
We can share them with each other through retellings, but sometimes that doesn’t seem like enough to capture the visceral feeling of being trapped in a nightmare. The Nightmare Gallery offers a visual alternative, so we can look at nightmares in a different way.
This project started with a simple question: “tell me your scariest nightmare.”
Fear Lab Director Kat Albrecht (CV) asked 300 people to describe their scariest nightmare, not just the mechanics of what happened, but also how it felt, sounded, smelled, and looked. The paintings below visualize elements of those nightmares and share those stories. In this series, the artist places herself within the nightmare, experiencing the horrors within.