“People look at me in fear after I tell them what I see in my dreams. Sometimes this look scares me more than the creatures that dwell in my hallucinations,”– Cornelia Schoenmann, a narcoleptic and independent artist shares her experience of lucid dreams. Lucid dreams helped her overcome her fear of terrifying hallucinations by learning to control them.
The first time Cornelia felt she was different from everyone else was in her teens, but she was officially diagnosed when she was 25 years old. At school, she could fall asleep right in the middle of an exam. To keep herself awake, she had to scratch her skin until she drew blood. In the late 1990s, there was little information about the symptoms of narcolepsy, a severe sleep disorder with fits of sudden oncoming sleep. The gamut of false diagnoses for narcoleptics ranged from a mental disorder to drug addiction.
Cornelia stumbled upon an article on insomnia, which casually talked about narcolepsy, and immediately recognized her own symptoms. From the moment the diagnosis was confirmed, she realized that complex visual hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and lucid dreaming would be her eternal companions. Not understanding how to control her condition, she turned to lucid dreams. She also took up photography (you can see the author’s photo in the article) in order to learn to experience her condition without perceiving it as a disease.
In her hallucinations, Cornelia is often in pain. She describes in detail how she feels the space around her change the moment the seizure begins. According to her, a character she created in the lucid dreaming state – a black eagle that taught her how to fly – has helped her cope with the constant feeling of panic. “Lucid dreaming is a technique that allows me to regain some control of my own nightmares and, as a result, experiment with new forms.” For the narcoleptic, it is also a way to connect two worlds with blurred boundaries –a fuzzy sense of reality and a shifting world of dreams.
The study was published in December 2020 in the Sociology & Technoscience journal.
