About the Collection
The Museum of Dreams’ collection features original dream material gathered through our Dreamers of the 21st Century project, as well as essays, conversations, and other documents that engage with dream material from the historical record. We also feature artists’ work that address the social and political aspects of dream life.
COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT
Treating dreams as a form of testimony, this large-scale collaborative project depicts a range of contemporary dreamers and explores the ways their dream life is connected to broader social and political realities.
Kiss of the Rabbit God By Gigi Wong
ESSAY + FILM
A discussion of Andrew Thomas Huang’s innovative short film, in which a Chinese American restaurant worker is visited by the deity of gay love—the Rabbit God—in his dreams.
Dreaming Under Russian Terror By Raimondo Lanza
ESSAY
Since March 2022, a Soviet-like martial law has been in effect in Russia which punishes anti-war statements with a fifteen-year prison sentence. The term “war” itself has been banned from public debate. In the absence of free speech, the truth is confined to the last place that remains inaccessible to power: dream life.
Between the Work and the World By Nataleah Hunter-Young
CONVERSATION
The dreams—and the spirit of an important bird—that guided South African visual artist Sethembile Msezane to her viral 2015 performance “Chapungu—The Day Rhodes Fell.”
CONVERSATION
Santasil Mallik speaks with the artist Soumya Sankar Bose about his photographic practice, including the innovative ways he documents the inner worlds of his collaborators.
The Collective Dreamwork of a Supervised Consumption Site
REPORT
After the Health Minister introduced legislation to shut down supervised consumption sites across the province of Ontario, the Museum of Dreams partnered with Moss Park CTS to gather data about this community’s dream life.
CONVERSATION
Charmaine Li in conversation with London-based contemporary Korean artist Bongsu Park about how the tradition of dream exchange has shaped her artistic practice.
Guardians of Sleep Original Soundtrack
MUSICAL ALBUM
Composed, performed, and produced by Andrew Braun, Guardians of Sleep Original Soundtrack is a collection of music based on material from the podcast of the same name.
Do Monsters Dream? By Melissa Adler
ESSAY
In May 1947 Jorge Luis Borges—Argentinian poet, writer, librarian, and dreamer—published a story about a monster named Asterion. It is a tale that turns on a dream.
HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
The creation of American cartoonist Windsor McKay, this full-page weekly comic strip ran intermittently from 1904 until the 1920s and is widely considered a masterpiece of the genre. Each page depicts a fantastic dream that is always interrupted by the protagonist's awakening in the final panel.
A Child is Dreaming By Aparna Mishra-Tarc
ESSAY + FILM
Fatima dreams that she is falling from a ship. Magnus Wennman’s work explores what the testimonies of children can tell us about war’s impact
HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, a Berlin-based journalist began secretly compiling a record of Berliner's dreams about the Nazi regime.
Henry James at the Louvre By Amy Freier
ESSAY
As a young boy Henry James visited the Louvre and was awestruck by the vastness of its collections. Later, as he worked on a memoir of childhood, the Louvre returned as the scene of a nightmare. In this vision, the museum space paralleled the terrain of the unconscious, conjuring up the novelist's lifelong struggle with issues of mastery and control.
Dreams of Destruction By Chris Vanderwees
ESSAY
Carl Jung and D.W. Winnicott both grappled with the problem of human aggression in their influential work. Although their positions about the source of this problem varied dramatically, in both cases these psychiatrists were visited by difficult dreams which spurred their ideas.
Kenny’s Window By Lucille Angus
ESSAY
Inspired by a 1952 clinical case study by Dorothy Baruch, Maurice Sendak's first children’s book tells the story of a boy’s dream-quest, an adventure that involves answering seven questions given to him by a four-legged rooster.
CONVERSATION
A conversation between Sharon Sliwinski and Amber Jacobs, head of Birkbeck’s Department of Psychosocial Studies about her YouTube series, Telling Tales, maternal force, and the “cunning intelligence” that can be found in fairy tales and myth.
CONVERSATION
A wide-ranging conversation between Chris Vanderwees and the co-founders of the 388, a Psychoanalytic Treatment Centre for Young Adult Psychotics in Québec City.
Dancing with a Great Dane By Ian Balfour
BOOK REVIEW
Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. A small collection of his dreams was published posthumously which provide an intimate glimpse of the philosopher's desires, guilt, and anxieties.
The Chickadee Dream By Ryan Shuvera
ESSAY
Plenty Coups, the great leader of the Mountain Crow Band, had many prophetic dreams and visions as a child. When he was a boy, he had a dream-vision about a chickadee which provided guidance for the Crow Nation in their relations with the American settlers.
Dreaming in the Field By Astrid Jamar
ESSAY
What can dreams tell us about transitional justice? Working with material from her own field diary, an emerging scholar reflects on the tension between her study of truth and reconciliation and the confusing reality that emerges when these ideals are put into practice in Rwanda and Burundi.
Treating Shell Shock By Sharon Sliwinski
ESSAY
During the First World War, a number of British poets wrote about their dreams as part of their treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers in Edinburgh, where they had been sent to recover from shell shock.
ESSAY
Before being diagnosed with breast cancer, Lana Lin dreamt she had a new internal organ. In the aftermath of treatment, she turned to artists like Audre Lorde, who faced similar bodily crises, and who had found ways to make something in the wake of devastation.
The Line By Shawn Michelle Smith
ESSAY
In my memory I want to locate the dream in childhood, in elementary, or perhaps middle school. A dream about an abstract concept. A nightmare about the line.
Documenting Reverie By Stephen Mayes
ESSAY
Photojournalist, filmmaker, and human rights advocate, Tim Hetherington produced a series of photographs of sleeping U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. He was opening up his documentary practice to new forms reverie when he was killed while on assignment in April 2011.
Gestapo/Geste à peau By Stephen Frosh
ESSAY
Sixteen minutes into Rendez-Vous chez Lacan, a documentary film about the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, one of his former patients, Suzanne Hommel, speaks of a haunting recurring dream and Lacan's startling response.
Freud’s Dream of Amerika By Patricia Gherovici
ESSAY
Freud describes his "Castle by the Sea" dream as containing "allusions to the maritime war between America and Spain." This war ended with the annexation of Puerto Rico to the United States, which spelled the end of 400 years of Spanish domination of the island and a new form of colonialism for the US.
Toward Truth and Reconciliation
BOOK REVIEW
In her testimony at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the mother of a murdered boy, Notrose Nobomvu Konile, shared a dream about a goat. The incomprehensibility of her testimony later became the grounds for a remarkable project about "the barriers we have to overcome, the lengths we have to go to, in order to arrive at some understanding of our fellow human beings."
The Artists Who Dream for Society By Constantin Houy
ESSAY
The German-born Swiss artist and poet Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is well-known for her involvement with the Surrealists. Less well-known is how strongly her art was inspired by her own dreams.
A Prisoner’s Nightmare By Sharon Sliwinski
ESSAY
According to his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela had one recurring nightmare while he was in prison on Robben Island.
Dreaming Woman is On Your Side By Noel Glover
ESSAY
In April 2005, the French playright-poet-philosopher, Hélène Cixous had a dream in which she and her friend Jacques Derrida appeared as two footballing mice. Derrida had died just a few months prior and the dream inaugurates Cixous's tribute to the philosopher, Insister of Jacques Derrida.
FILM + ESSAY
This award-winning short film is based on the photographer’s experiences of visiting Koza, Japan (officially Okinawa City) and how places and people revisit him in recurring dreams. Accompanied by an essay by Sharon Sliwinski.
The Balcony and Our Dreams By Aylin Kuryel
FILM + ESSAY
Shot in the Turkish province of Izmir during lockdown, Aylin Kuryel’s 14-minute documentary captures life in crisis through dynamic transitions between public and private, inside and outside, personal and political. Accompanied by an essay by Aziz Güzel.
MUSICAL ALBUM
Three years in the making, this collaborative album initiated by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd focuses on the dream-life of U.S. veterans of color who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
DANCE
A movement work inspired by one of Walter’s Benjamin’s dreams from when he was interned at a so-called “voluntary workers’ camp” during WWII.