The Museum of Dreams is a research hub dedicated to exploring the social and political significance of dream life. We work with artists, researchers, activists, and cultural institutions to cultivate, collect, and creatively work with dreams from both the historical record and contemporary life. Founded in 2017, the Museum provides a platform for critical conversations and storytelling projects.
Each culture has its own method for handling the images that come into our mind while we sleep. The Museum does not an attempt to catalogue all these methods, nor does it seek to subject the experience of dreaming to a universal theory. Our goal is to explore the generative and performative nature of dream life—to amplify all the remarkable ways people have put their dreams to work.
We focus on the way dreams can serve as a medium for articulating the things we have trouble expressing – the experiences, feelings, and ideas that we struggle to voice to ourselves and each other. There is an urgent need to find ways to incorporate this not-yet-conscious material into our shared social imaginaries—to identify and integrate what Toni Morrison once named the “unspeakable things unspoken.” Among other things, dreaming serves as a means to narrate and work through that which has been rendered silent – marginalized either by exclusion or repression.
We believe dreaming is one of the most important means through which we can envision and transform the collective world that lies between us.
Inspired by a broad body of research, the Museum’s chief mandate is to explore new and old ways to access and share the power of dream-work as a collective resource for engaging our social and political conflicts. In support of this aim, the Museum actively develops partnerships with a wide variety of individuals and institutions – from the arts and cultural sectors to mental health and community care.
