nicholas bruno
"People love to pick apart my images and I don't really mind when they do that, but they have to see what the project is too," says Bruno. "Even if it's not perfect, it's still a representation of my internal struggle."
nicholas bruno
At first Bruno thought he was possessed, and explanations for his condition still trouble him. "I know it's all in my head, but it's hard not to delve into the world of spiritual explanation," he says. "The cool part is to look at it from both perspectives. You can see them literally for what they are, or you can create the symbolism to express what they could mean."
nicholas bruno
Surreal humor is one of the weapons Bruno brings to combat his dreams. "The dreams are terrifying, but they can be comical sometimes. Say I've already had a dream, I'll go back to sleep and exactly the same thing will happen again. I'll poke fun at it. It's not always the most terrifying thing."
nicholas bruno
"I have yet to see another photographer tackle sleep paralysis," says Bruno. "It's mostly painters tackling the subject." Bruno points to Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting "The Nightmare" as the oldest known documentation of the phenomenon.
nicholas bruno
"Once I feel comfortable with what I want to express in a single image, I'll go out location scouting," says Bruno. He shoots most of his images around his home of Northport, New York, which is geographically diverse enough to furnish him with woods, marshlands and beaches.
nicholas bruno
Bruno uses fire to represent a panicked awakening from his dreams. "Have you ever been totally startled by something, or realized something, and had that tingling burst of energy in your chest? It's that burst of anxiety. I try to express flame as being that exact moment."
nicholas bruno
The bowler-hatted, besuited characters may evoke surrealist René Magritte, but the formal wear was also born out a way to depict Bruno's faceless figures. "When I was creating those works, I was looking at Magritte, but I was also trying to portray these figures as best as possible without just taking pictures of black blobs floating across the scene," explains Bruno.
nicholas bruno
"I can't figure out why things are happening, where these characters are coming from, who's trying to contact me," says Bruno. But his art allows him to communicate his experiences with other suffers of sleep paralysis.
nicholas bruno
Bruno's photos make frequent use of a dark, cloying water. "When you're lying on your back [in sleep paralysis] you can't really breathe. The water is like trying to emerge from that -- you barely have your head or your arms just out of the dream, but you're still swamped by it," says Bruno.
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Having lived with the condition for many years, Bruno is able to bring his own influence to bear on his condition. "The dreams do become repetitive sometimes, with recurring characters. As I get older and I experience them time over time, I'm able to learn more about them, twist and turn things."
nicholas bruno
Bruno brings a dark, oil painting aesthetic to much of his work. "I'm very interested in 19th century art," he explains. "A time when artists rebelled against making clean, classical stuff and made their own types of weird, chaotic stuff."
nicholas bruno
The photographer's process is mostly a solitary activity: He largely shoots alone, with just a camera, tripod and remote trigger. He even models most of his own shots. "I'm jumping into a swamp with a big ladder -- I'm not going to make my friends do that!"
nicholas bruno
Bruno's masked figures come from both representation and necessity. "I can never pick out any sort of facial expression. The only thing I'll maybe see is a gaped open mouth," says Bruno. "The masked figures express how they don't have faces, resonate with the act of being choked or suffocated by the dream itself -- and it allows me to be in the photograph multiple times."
nicholas bruno
"It's really about the low-budget," says Bruno. He makes his own props or gets them for free from Craigslist, and works with natural light instead of lighting equipment. "You don't need thousands of dollars of props or equipment or models. And you definitely don't need expensive equipment to make stunning images," he tells CNN.
nicholas bruno
In REM sleep, our bodies paralyze themselves to ensure that we don't act out our dreams -- but in Bruno's case, his mind is awake and conjuring up vivid, macabre hallucinations. "For people who haven't experienced it, and say they want to -- they really don't," Bruno tells CNN.
nicholas bruno
nicholas bruno
Bruno says that he doesn't watch horror movies for the thrills -- "I'm not very easily scared anymore." But he watches them because "people creating horror movies are doing it for the same reasons as I am: They're expressing their fears."
nicholas bruno
Bruno says that being the model in his own images reflects the struggle of his dreams themselves, but also allows him to control over the images. "When I'm in the water with a linen mask over my face, I feel like I'm suffocating. But once have that image, I feel so much better about having something tangible to show everybody: 'Hey, this is what I'm experiencing.'"
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"It's a great experiment, to take things from your own head that you've experienced, to take something terrible and turn it into something tangible," he says.
nicholas bruno
"Boom, you just woke up and what's going on? Or boom, you just woke up and your house is on fire. It's that quick anxiety," Bruno explains. "The most recent image that I shot, I burned a doll house. It's me trying to extinguish the immediate effect of what's going on."

Story highlights

Photographer Nicolas Bruno suffers from sleep paralysis

He uses his nightmares as inspiration, and recreates each horrific scene as a photograph

CNN  — 

Nicolas Bruno falls asleep like the rest of us. But when his eyes snap open, things are very different.

A demonic, faceless silhouette floats above him. It’s screaming into his ear. Ghostly hands are choking him. His body is frozen, rigid, to the bed.

He feels everything. And he can’t move a single muscle.

There’s nothing he can do but try to wake up.

It sounds like a great setup for a horror movie, but this is all too real.

The 22-year-old photographer suffers from sleep paralysis. It’s a condition which happens just as he’s about to enter REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is the dreaming phase.

In REM sleep, our bodies paralyze themselves to ensure that we don’t act out our dreams – but in Bruno’s case, his mind is awake and conjuring up vivid, macabre hallucinations.

“For people who haven’t experienced it, and say they want to – they really don’t,” Bruno tells CNN. “You’ve never woken up being choked out by shadow hands. You’ve never had a looming figure floating above your bed, screaming into your ear.”

Sleep paralysis dreamers report hearing screaming, feeling malevolent presences in the room, or an immense, evil pressure on their chests. All the while, they’re unable to lift a finger.

Dreams of possession

Nicolas Bruno first experienced sleep paralysis when he was 15. The visions came to him almost every night. “I would go to bed and I would wake up immediately right into one of those dreams. I wouldn’t sleep for two days at a time because I was so afraid to go to bed,” he says.

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“I thought I was possessed by demons.” It pushed him into a cycle of insomnia and depression, too exhausted to stay awake and too terrified to go to sleep. He was borderline suicidal.

Relief only came near the end of Bruno’s high school career, when a teacher suggested that he try to document these night terrors. After seeing Bruno’s journals, his teacher suggested he should take these visions and implement them into his art. Bruno combined a talent he’d recently discovered – photography – with these visions he’d never been able to comprehend.

Taking back control

By turning his visions into a concrete, physical reality, Bruno was able to take back control from a condition defined by a total lack of it.

Astonishing photo-realistic portraits are actually painted by hand

“It’s a great experiment, to take things from your own head that you’ve experienced, to take something terrible and turn it into something tangible,” he says.

His work has allowed him to learn to live with his condition.

Bruno brings his own, whimsical style to his moments of terror, creating darkly comic images laden with dream symbolism. His photos are ornate and motif-heavy, an “Inception” for the thinking man.

The characters that appear in his images are blindfolded, or entirely obscured by wraps of linen. They’re bound and yearning for escape from swampy water that drags them down. Flame bursts through like a moment of awakening, while hooded figures attack and give chase.

Nicholas Bruno

But his shots are also darkly comic, with incongruous touches and lashings of the surreal: from Magritte-style bowler hats and apples, to implausible William Tell scenarios and cumbersome diving helmets.

Through his work, Bruno has found that it’s enabled him to talk about his condition as he’d never been able to before. “I found it very hard to talk about the dreams to people before I started this process. People thought I was crazy.”

And in doing so, he’s found a community of fellow sufferers.

“I’ve gotten so many responses from people who have had these dreams and didn’t know what they meant. I think it’s my little mission to spread the word of this condition.”

Virtual paralysis

Bruno has been commissioned to bring his unique aesthetic to several book covers and he’d like to move into making artwork for bands – but this recent graduate is currently working on showing his work in galleries, where so far it’s been met with a positive response.

He sees his art as having saved him from a terrible fate. “This project has gifted me a sense of who I am. It gave me the strength to persevere in life, to create art and speak to people. It gifted me art, and I don’t know where I would be without it,” he tells CNN.

And while Bruno sees photography, not film, as his medium, he’s also in the early stages of a virtual reality project which will combine his art with the moving image. The idea: to set up a single bed in a gallery. “One person goes in at a time and we’ll put them in this bed and put a VR headset on, with a virtual reality experience of what it might be like to have a sleep paralysis dream.”

It’s as close to the real thing as you’d ever want to get.