Dreamers of the 21st Century
The Museum of Dreams is excited to announce the launch of Dreamers of the 21st Century, a large-scale research-creation project. Built through a series of community partnerships, our goal is to create a lasting record of contemporary dream life, to encourage engagement with this important domain, and in so doing, generate new ideas, new worlds, and new ways of being.
Dreamers of the 21st Century treats dreams as a form of testimony about our lived experience. Sharing these experiences opens a special kind of dialogue about the psychosocial forces that shape our lives. Our project understands dreaming, in this larger sense, to be one of the most important tools we have for envisioning our collective world.
Background
Human beings are dreaming creatures. The images, thoughts, and feelings that come into our minds while we sleep have long been understood to be one of humanity’s most important means for processing our experiences and envisioning new worlds.
Historically, dreaming was central to the social life of many societies. And while many Indigenous communities continue to treat dreams as an important source of knowledge, these visions were actively devalued in the Western world with the rise of scientific rationality. Psychoanalysis revived dreams as a tool for therapeutic treatment at the turn of the 20th century, and in recent decades, studies of dreaming have exploded in the neurosciences, where this process has been shown to support a wide range of mental functions, including creativity, learning, emotional processing, and the consolidation of memories.
Dreamers of the 21st Century brings this broad body of research together to explore how attending to dream life can provide a holistic and innovative way to address complex issues pertaining to people and communities’ sense of well-being: their quality of life, sense of flourishing, resilience, and ability to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose.
Our project pays special attention to the socius of the dreamer. Human beings are biopsychosocial creatures, and our dream life reflects our relationship to the worlds we inhabit, including all the variables of race, class, gender, political status, and other social ecologies of which we are a part. As the psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, succinctly put it: dreams have a “proper time” and a “proper place.” These visions manifest the dreamer’s unique bond to the social imaginary.
Methodology
Dreamers of the 21st Century utilizes a community-led approach that makes each community an equal partner in the research process and aims towards positive outcomes that are sustainable beyond the life of the project. The first phase will privilege peoples and communities who have been historically and persistently marginalized and/or subjugated by colonization, war, or other forms of structural injustice, including (but not limited to) Indigenous communities, refugees and migrants, queer and trans people, substance users, and the un- or underhoused. The principles of equity, dignity, sustainability, and justice will guide the co-creation of this data.
Apart from gathering oral testimony about dream life, the research team will work with community partners to develop novel ways to visually portray the dreamers. This aspect of the project approach is directly inspired by August Sander’s monumental photographic project, People of the 20th Century, an extensive visual record of the German populace between the world wars.
The project also borrows from methods developed by Robert Jay Lifton and Gordon Lawrence, both of whom established unique ways of working with dreams in social contexts. While we acknowledge the therapeutic aspects of attending to dreams, we primarily seek to create a comprehensive record that is addressed to a broad public audience.
Pilot projects & current partnerships
The Museum of Dreams has conducted several pilot projects with different community groups. In 2019, we worked with La Roseraie, a migrant community centre in Geneva, Switzerland and in 2021, we embarked on a COVID-19 dream collection project in partnership with the Museum of London in the UK.
Our current partners include Moss Park CTS, part of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, which offers supervised consumption and overdose prevention services in downtown Toronto.
This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
For more information, contact the Principal Investigator, Professor Sharon Sliwinski, ssliwins@uwo.ca