Lucid Dreams chronicles my journey through Long Covid, exploring questions about the afterlife, while reflecting on the process of reclaiming my power.

While bedridden with Long Covid, I became increasingly frustrated. To channel these feelings, I began creating photographs. I took self-portraits while lying in bed and merging them with images of spiderwebs and illustrations from medical journals. This process allowed me to express the sense of being trapped within this illness. At times, I felt hopeless and helpless, as though I was suspended in a reality where I wasn’t quite asleep but not entirely awake either. It was a restless sleep and I was so tired! The fatigue was overwhelming - it was more than mere tiredness; it felt like an existential exhaustion.

I wasn’t in pain, nor was I truly unhappy. I was simply languishing.

There came a point when I began to question whether I would survive this illness, which led me to contemplate what happens when we leave this life. I wondered whether our souls have any power over what our afterlives look like. I took an introspective journey into my beliefs and desires surrounding death - not in a morbid sense, but truly questioning. To symbolize the soul in my photographs, I inverted images of the female form from black-and-white negatives I had taken many years ago, layering them with images from space.

I had to shift the way I was used to creating. Because I could only work for about an hour a day, I would return to bed allowing my imagination to merge with my physical limitations. It was during these periods of rest that the solution would often come to me. When I returned to the computer, the image would often feel intuitively resolved.The change was like having a peek into my subconscious.

Finally, after nearly 3 years, I began to get better, but I was no longer the same person. I felt vulnerable and frightened and I knew I needed to reclaim my personal power. I began to visualize what my “inner goddess” might look like, and this became a transformative experience. I plan to continue this process imagining the power within other women who may be feeling powerless. I want to help them visually discover the strength they may still hold deep inside.