Hypnos

By Charlotte Cheung, 17

Ohio

Medium: digital art

This is a piece based on the feeling of not being productive and wanting nothing but to sleep. Knowing that you have responsibilities that will only pile up if you sleep, but curling up on a soft couch is all your mind can think of, is a tough feeling to swallow – a feeling that I wanted to represent with the dreaminess of this piece. I am definitely guilty of napping as a means of escaping school and other worries. But I’d like to blame it on Hypnos, who the Greeks believed could poison one to sleep with poppy flowers. Here, there are cherub looking figures with winged temples, as Hypnos is often portrayed. They’re holding flowers, which are actually sunflowers rather than poppies. Since sunflowers are associated with the sun and daytime, this is a reference to napping while the sun is still up.

As some may have experienced, the sleepiness is caused by other factors besides physical exhaustion. As Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, it is the “balm of hurt minds.”