Live on the Surface of Dreams

In waking life, our approach to dreams is often limited by conceptual language or fixed cultural conditions. Artists can play a role in taking the public beyond such constraints. This paper examines the material environments artists have produced for transforming audiences’ attitudes toward their oneiric experience.

Since the 1960s two contrasting strategies have emerged in the UK in artist’s work in relation to dreams. These two strategies transfer authorship, in the understanding of dreams, from an external source toward aesthetic judgments that are generated by audiences themselves. One approach has waking audiences encounter the performer asleep and the material analogue of their dream. This paper looks at ‘Studies Towards an Experiment into the Structure of Dreams’; a collaboration between Mark Boyle, Joan Hills and Gaziella Martinez, which materialized dream activity in a sound and light show. The show ran for seventy performances in the winter of 1967 at the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, London – a setting of temporary autonomy for the communities of young minds transformed by the liminal state of British culture during that period. In contrast Luke Jerram’s installation ‘Dream Director’, which last toured the UK in 2007, had audiences of strangers sleep overnight within a gallery space and experience their own dreams within the artwork. Both strategies are united in treating the dream as a live happening rather than attempting to represent its content after the event.

Why make art in relation to dreams but without representing dream content? The artworks discussed in this paper reflect the material conditions from which the dream state emerges but avoid the conditions of meaning that absorb its psychic potential. These are radical gestures, the results of which sit uncomfortably between art and science, but provide an experimental setting whose analysis might help to reveal changes in cultural attitudes toward the dream and public space.