A place for dreamers.

The Museum of Dreams is a research hub and public memory studio dedicated to exploring the social and political significance of dream life.

Founded in 2017, and based in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University in Canada, we collaborate with a wide variety of individuals and institutions to cultivate, collect, and creatively work with dreams from the historical record and contemporary life. Our network includes researchers, archivists, artists, scientists, students, community health workers, and cultural institutions.  

Why a Museum of Dreams?

Human beings need to dream. Just like sleep, dreaming is crucial for our collective health and wellbeing. This everyday activity is one of our most important tools for envisioning, processing, and transforming our lived experience. Recent scientific studies have shown that dreaming supports a wide range of biological and psychological functions, including the regulation of emotions, the consolidation of memory, learning, and creativity.

For millennia, dreaming has been used as a social practice to access different forms of knowledge and as a technique for generating new worlds and new ways of living. Attending to dream life was once considered to be vital to the care of the self, and sharing these visions was thought to be necessary for the social good.

The Museum of Dreams seeks to restore dreaming to its proper place as a key cultural resource that supports our collective imagination.  

What do we do?

The Museum of Dreams is “a museum without objects.” We borrow this idea from the French historian Françoise Vergès who has called for a new kind of post-museum, one that defies the Western museum model which is too often governed by a logic of colonial accumulation.

We provide a forum for original research and creative work that engages with the transformative potential of dream life. We collaborate widely to cultivate new ways of working with the past and new strategies for envisioning the future. And together with our partners, we gather individual and community testimony about dream life as a way to document the impact of complex social and political situations.

In all of our projects, the Museum of Dreams privileges participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. We centre communities who are most affected by social and structural injustices with the goal of amplifying local efforts to pursue collective transformation.

How are we funded?

Our core funding comes from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are also supported by Western University.