The Wave

The wave is a retrusion hallucination. Painting essentially, this is a dream painted in real time, and I took the form of the wave because that’s what the colours dictated as the forms kind of appeared. I often shape it into something that people can recognise; otherwise, the whole page becomes hallucinatory, which can be great, but sometimes I want it to be first seen as a wave, and then the next look is to see the forms inside the wave.

Ryan Louder is a London-based artist known for his vivid, hallucinatory paintings inspired by real-time REM intrusion episodes a neurological phenomenon linked to his narcolepsy. Diagnosed at Guy's Hospital, this rare condition causes dream states to bleed into waking life, allowing Ryan to capture surreal visions as they unfold. His work explores the threshold between consciousness and imagination, often layering "images within images" to evoke shifting realities and altered perception.

Ryan's practice merges visual storytelling with neurodivergent insight-transforming a medical anomaly into a portal of constant creativity.