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Salvador Dalí- Dormeuse, cheval, lion invisibles ,1930

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Artist Research-Ella
Graphics and marketing- Sara and Shakira
Model making (actual and virtual)- Graham and Kim
Artworks/objects in miniature- Everyone
Photo Documentation- Everyone
PowerPoint- Graham
Script writing- Everyone

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Artist inspo for the cloud ideas

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Video art and art installation. Often described as surreal and abstract.

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Women asleep on the couch is dreaming and has been teleported into a forest listening to the sounds of the forest. 

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Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a pomegranate a second before waking 

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Rain Room- was an experimental piece. It relates to soothing sounds which are therapeutic relating to dreams.

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surrealism could link to dreams as they are the main inspiration behind surrealist works and the power of the unconscious.

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Jean Arp - abstract sculptures inspired by 'earthly forms' (this ones inspired by a star= night= sleep)

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Idea 3
Includes circular balcony

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Idea 2

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Idea 1

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Building that looks like a cloud-interior

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Building that looks like a cloud-interior

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room within room?

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- place to sleep
- write dreams on wall?
- bean bags or beds
- stairs and lift - high up

- different layers; nightmares / nice dreams/ installation / film

- structures within a space
- projections onto clouds?

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This is an element idea to add to the architecture of our building 

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- clouds literally in the sky, multiple clouds = multiple rooms
- dreamy, cozy (like a bed)
- mixture of installation /film / 2D/ 3D
- thinking about sounds (ppl listen to sounds to sleep?) and lighting (dim lighting, lamps - could be hard to see the artwork though)

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COLLABORATION
Research-Ella
Graphics and marketing-Kim
Model making (actual and virtual)- Graham and Kim
Artworks/objects in miniature- Everyone
Photo Documentation- Shakira
PowerPoint- Graham
Script writing- Everyone

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dream/reality/surreal/mirror

are you kidding?
are you sleeping?
is this a dream?
am i dreaming?
dream machine
am i still in a dream?
is this real life?
no sex just dreaming
what do your dreams look like?
altered sense of reality
are they hallucinations
hallucinations
detached observer

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cloud?
mirror maze?

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Art: The False Mirror - Annenberg Learner

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Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 | MoMA

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Have you ever dreamt of stepping into a painting? Now you can with this exhibition that has been touring since 2017 with +5,000,000 visitors! Get your tickets now!
Crowned the GOLD MEDALIST for both Best Exhibition Experience and Best Immersive Experience at the prestigious Eventex 2023 Awards.
Awarded best 2021 immersive experience by USA Today.
Ranked among the 12 best immersive experiences in the world by CNN.

An Immersive Experience

Step into a +1000 m2 light and sound spectacular exhibit featuring two-story projections of the artist's most compelling works.

VR Experience

Walk alongside Van Gogh during a visually rich journey into the inspiration behind 8 of his iconic works, including Vincent's Bedroom at Arles & Starry Night Over The Rhone.* *Additional purchase necessary for standard tickets.

Rediscover Art

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience reinvents the concept of museums. Get to know the artist and his art like never before with the help of exquisite storytelling and cutting-edge technology.

Put Your Paintings On Display

Discover what it feels like to be in Van Gogh's shoes for a day. Make your own paintings and have them projected on the walls in an experience loved by kids and grown-ups alike.

What people think about our Van Gogh exhibit

There is no better gift for yours than sharing an experience like this. Share a journey full of memories that invites you to step into the universe of the Dutch genius, Vincent van Gogh.

The most hotly anticipated exhibition.

We've been banging on about 'Van Gogh: The Immersive Show' for what feels like forever. With good reason! The retina-battering, virtual-reality post-Impressionist extravaganza that's taken up residence at 106 Commercial Street has all the qualities needed to make it a post-pandemic smash. Why not utterly lose yourself in a load of lush brush-strokes for a few hours? Sounds nice.

Our pick of the best late summer days out.

1. Date: From July, 2021

2. Opening hours: (time slots available every half hour)

Open Monday to Sunday

Closed on Tuesdays

3. Duration: The visit will take around 90 minutes

4. Location: 106 Commercial Street, London. E1 6LZ

5. Age requirement: All ages!

Book tickets

Corporate Events

The mesmerizing ambience of Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience makes for a stunning corporate event. Contact us and we will help you organize the perfect outing to enjoy as a group.

Private Events

Book a private event for your group and have the exhibition all to yourself. Perfect for birthday parties, large get-togethers and more!

Schools, Universities & Associations

Looking to plan an academic excursion? Let us know and we will help your group enjoy Van Gogh's masterpieces to the fullest.

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience in London offers private bookings perfectly suited to various kinds of groups and events (30+ people):

106 Commercial Street, E1 6LZ

Get directions

This stunning former 19th century stable building, sits opposite the famous Old Spitalfields Market and is centred around a triple height atrium. At over 17,000 sqft, 106 is spread over 3 floors with many original features including exposed brickwork, timber beams, a beautiful arch entrance and the stable areas themselves.

Do you have any questions? Maybe you can find the answer here!

Exhibition Hub

Exhibition Hub has a proven track-record producing more than 70 exhibitions and immersive edutainment experiences around the world, reaching more than 6 million visitors. Exhibition Hub delivers edutainment experiences to wide audiences and adapts its productions to the venue, each time creating an original experience.

They offer a spectacular 360° video, light and music experience and a one of a kind virtual reality experience which complements the immersive experience.

Fever

Fever is the leading global entertainment discovery platform, helping over 40 million people every month to discover the best experiences in their cities. Through its platform, Fever inspires users to enjoy the best local experiences, from gigs to theatre, live music, immersive experiences, and pop-ups, while empowering event organizers to create new original content.

Produced by:

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Van Gogh London Exhibit: The Immersive Experience

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Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience in London is a 360º digital art exhibit that invites you to step into the universe of the Dutch genius, Vincent van Gogh. Experience his most famous works, such as The Starry Night and Sunflowers, in a whole new way. Get your tickets now!

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Dreams throughout Art - Artsper Magazine

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How do you depict the indescribable? Is dreaming the preferred path of the subconscious?
Within the history of art, the dream is a very common theme, particularly the idea of the dream and its meaning in a painting. Mysterious and elusive, paintings surrounding dreams question, disturb and fascinate us all at once. In other words, the dream in art is a wandering spirit on the path of the imagination. It is through this pictorial representation that we are consequently forced to examine the link between the visible and the invisible. Whether it be through a religious or a more psychological perspective, artists who express their dreams through painting lead us to explore subjects that are often left untouched. Artsper invites you to look back through the history of this dreamy phenomenon over five key periods in time.

The Renaissance, a biblical and mythological depiction of dream painting

Today, often perceived as a manifestation of the subconscious and the psyche, dreaming is a theme which has greatly evolved throughout the history of art. Its representation has therefore transformed over time, always expanding somewhat in definition as a result. During the Renaissance era, dreaming was solely presented as a religious experience. That is to say when the soul, at rest, leaves the body and encounters higher beings. Subsequently, dream art in the 15th and 16th centuries does not actually depict the artist's dream. Instead, it is inspired by religious narratives to depict biblical dreams. A painting of a dream had a specific meaning; it was a way to access the higher realm and divine truth. Therefore the painter of the dream, principally in response to the demands of the Church, depicted religious figures inspired by the New Testament.

The personal dream only became legitimized much later. Consequently, the first artist to paint a dream of their own was Albrecht Dürer, in his watercolor painting The Vision in 1525.

For instance, Raphaël perfectly demonstrates a representation of a religious dream in his painting The Dream of Jacob. The canvas is darkened, but the soul of Jacob, accompanied by angels, is brighter and appears raised into the heavens. Secondly, the staircase effectively symbolises the spirit's ascension, and the path to achieve transcendence.

Dreams of Romantic artists "recreating the world"

With Romanticism, the 18th century brought about a change to freedom of artistic expression of the personal dream in paintings. During this period, subjectivity became the heart of inspiration for artists, and dreaming an infinite source of inspiration for self exploration! The first German Romantics called dreaming the "Zweite Welt", or the "second world". Daydreams were a way for artists to completely leave themselves in order to experience another world.

The Romantics experimented with many substances in order to achieve a dreamlike state. The painter Eugène Delacroix for example participated in the "Club des Haschinschins". This was a group dedicated to the study and experience of drugs, in which the doctor Moreau de Tour analyzed their dreams and hallucinations. To the Romantics, dreaming was an escape, but also a revelation of what was deep in one's soul.

A perfect representation of dark dreams can be found in The Nightmare. The piece by the British artist Johann Heinrich Füssli is a dream painting which explores the subject of an odalisque - a nude woman lying down - in order to evoke the torments of the sleeping spirit. The chiaroscuro, the contortion of the body and the phantasmagorical beings unveil the tortured soul of this sleeping woman. As a result, the observer bears witness to this nightmare that Fussli has presented, which exemplifies the most morbid and fantastical elements of dreaming.

It is also through nature that the Romantic artists explored dreams. Associated with solitude, nature allowed them to flee the challenges of society and stimulated their imagination.

For example, in Der Träumer by Friedrich, a man gazes upon the horizon and appears to be lost in his own world, a type of melancholy daydream.

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Träumer, 1835-1840

Symbolism, between the world of dreams and nightmares

In the 19th century, the dream in art was at the heart of the symbolist aesthetic. Estranged from a society involved with scientific ideology, Symbolism aimed to explore the dreams of the invisible and the mysteries of the subconscious. The subjects and objects of Symbolists only acquire meaning through their symbolic representation.

Symbolism was born in reaction to Naturalism and Realism, artistic movements which only depicted tangible and visible things.

Odilon Redon, nicknamed "king of dreams" by the art critic Thadée Natanson, was a figurehead of Symbolism. An artist, dreamer and poet, he was fascinated by the feeling and the struggles of being human. His artworks are very personal and free. His lithographs, created between 1879 and 1899 and entitled the Noirs, unveil a harrowing world where hybrid figures seem to have come straight out of a nightmare. These include a spider with a human face, a flying eye, horrifying chimeras and even a human flower.

Odilon Redon, La Vision, 1890-1900, and L'Araignée qui pleure, 1881
Starting in 1990, Odilion Redon came out of his dark period and into the light. From thereon his shift to colorful, pastel works marked a new era of serenity. Once again, the artist returned to the subject of dreams. However, it was now more so a sweet dream due to the painting of hazy shapes and surprisingly calm faces.

Odilon Redon, La Cellule d'Or, 1893 and Le Rêve, 1905
Subconscious and dream art in Surrealism

Does dreaming allow us to access absolute reality? This was the question posed by André Breton, a precursor to Surrealism. To him, the very essence of the movement was to reunite the real and the imaginary. The biggest painters of dreams are also Surrealists: Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Mirò, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico. In each of their Surrealist dream paintings, they convey dreams as an experience halfway between the visible and the invisible.

Man Ray is mainly known for his iconic Surrealist photographs. Despite this, his illustrations for the collection Free Hands in collaboration with Paul Eluard are striking. A dreamlike universe can be found in many of his drawings. as Man Ray stated: "In the morning when I wake up, if I have a dream, I draw it right away. Many of the drawings in Free Hands are dream drawings. "

In The Broken Bridge, the legs of the naked, elongated woman are bent, like an extension of the destroyed bridge. Her dreamy face and long hair are reflected in the water of the Rhone, feeding the imagination of the spectator.

Man Ray, The Broken Bridge, 1937

The Turning Point, another illustration by Man Ray, is a metaphor for the endless representations that surreal dreams can give rise to. The sharp turn hides what awaits the traveler. Besides this, to whom does the disproportionate hand belong? The surrealist approach rejects finality and practicality in favor of the imaginary and the indescribable.

Contemporary art: an abundance of dream depictions

Although the dream in art is a theme that has been reinvented over the years, there are still many on the contemporary scene showcasing it. Representations of dreams are abundant, and artists draw clear inspiration from past movements.

Through Julie Lagier's lens, objects and female figures take on an unusual dimension. Inspired by Surrealism, her art stems from her dreams as she reinterprets them, presenting them in a hazy and evasive manner. In her exploration of Surrealism and dream art, her photographs are joyfully distorted, sometimes falling into the realm of incomprehension to the outside eye.

Gabrielle Rul's delicate sketches deploy a poetic and authentic imagination.

Dream art, an immortal shape-shifter

In conclusion, whether it be representations of the afterlife or the subconscious, the bringing of the imaginary to our own world, no matter its form, dream art always evokes something powerful within us. As a result, all at once it brings together the personal and the intimate, the fantastical and nightmarish, but equally the prophetic and divine. Artists, contemporary or otherwise, will never finish stunning us with their explorations of dream art.

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Dreams throughout Art - Artsper Magazine

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Explore the history of the dream in painting, photography and art history.

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The Two Frida’s
Reflection of her Mexican upbringing in comparison to the Western European influences

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Surrealism – Art Term | Tate

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Tate glossary definition for surrealism: Movement, which began in the 1920s, of writers and artists who experimented with ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination

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is a banana art? why is it worth so much?

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Maurizio Cattelan is more than a prankster, and "Comedian," his potassium-rich latest work, is more than an overpriced piece of fruit.

Crowds like these were one reason the banana on the wall that the artist Maurizio Cattelan called "Comedian" was taken down early at Art Basel Miami Beach. Credit... Eva Uzcategui/Reuters

Art may be long, and life short, but the existence of a hand fruit is most ephemeral of all. This week at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world's premier Champagne-steeped swap meet, no work drew more grins, guffaws and selfies than a new sculpture by the semiretired Italian trickster Maurizio Cattelan: a banana duct-taped to the wall, its peel already speckled with brown spots.

It's titled "Comedian." By Wednesday it had already won art-world notoriety, and on Saturday it achieved a public visibility that any artist would envy, after a self-promoting wag tore the banana off the wall and gobbled it up. (Not many iconic art works can also be said to be a rich source of potassium.)

Suffice it to say that works of contemporary art rarely make the cover of the New York Post, but this is Mr. Cattelan's second recent appearance on the tabloid's front page; in 2016, he emerged from semiretirement to install a functional 18-karat-gold toilet in a restroom of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which drew snaking lines of art lovers. Now the Italian artist is back in the headlines and the Instagram stories, and his purloined banana has offered the perfect weapon to those who think that contemporary art is one big prank. I can only imagine the "60 Minutes" segment this would elicit if Morley Safer were still alive.

"Comedian" was withdrawn from view at Art Basel on Sunday, because of the crowds and the hullaballoo, so let us first settle the matter of whether the artwork has been destroyed or defaced. I don't have much good to say about the random guy who munched Mr. Cattelan's banana, though it continues a long tradition of literalists who like bringing conceptual art from the realm of ideas back down to Earth. Numerous artists have relieved themselves in "Fountain," Marcel Duchamp's upturned urinal; John Lennon, in 1966, notoriously picked up an apple in Yoko Ono's first London exhibition and took a bite. And thus they met.

"Apple, 1966" at the exhibition "Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971," in 2015. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

For when it comes to the banana's ontological status as art or produce, I thought we had settled this already. If you buy a light work by Dan Flavin and the fluorescent bulb starts flickering, you can replace it with a new one. If you buy a Sol LeWitt wall drawing and you move house, you can erase the old one and draw a new one. A banana, even more than a light fixture, was always going to require replacement; Mr. Cattelan had already drawn up instructions for the lucky collectors to replace the fruit every week to 10 days ("Everybody changes flowers regularly," his dealer Emmanuel Perrotin observed.)

As to why Mr. Cattelan's banana has gripped the public imagination, it has something to do with its price - $120,000 to $150,000, in an edition of three and two artists' proofs - and the emperor's-new-clothes impression of the international collecting class fawning over it at Art Basel. (When Lucille Bluth, the doyenne of "Arrested Development," said, " It's one banana, Michael, what could it cost? Ten dollars?," it turns out she was off by a factor of 10,000.) Something to do, also, with the comic potential of bananas. I don't think that a taped-up pineapple would have got this much viral traction.

I wasn't in Miami this week, and I feel a little hesitant delivering a critical judgment about a work I haven't seen in person. Though even writing that, I recognize I am exposing myself to derision. What kind of critic treats a piece of fruit with the same seriousness as a Rembrandt? It's just a banana, you nitwit!

Well, is it art? Is Mr. Cattelan taking us for a ride? Did you have to be there? Isn't this banana just a banana, and not a wry commentary on male sexuality, genetic monocultures, or Central American geopolitics? (I am sparing you a lecture on the Guatemalan coup d'état of 1954, and the origin of the phrase "banana republic"....)

Let me reassure you, you are not a hopeless philistine if you find this all a bit foolish. Foolishness, and the deflating sensation that a culture that once encouraged sublime beauty now only permits dopey jokes, is Mr. Cattelan's stock in trade. But perhaps you will find more to appreciate in Mr. Cattelan's work if you take note of two points: one formal, one social.

First, I have been dismayed to discover that for a work that has been endlessly photographed and parodied over the course of its one-week life, almost nobody has discussed that it is not just "a banana." It is a banana and a piece of duct tape, and this is a significant difference. "Comedian" is not a one-note Dadaist imposture in which a commodity is proclaimed a work of art - which would be an entire century out of date now, as dated as a film director mimicking D.W. Griffith. "Comedian" is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Cattelan's decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier art.

His renowned "Novecento" (1997), a taxidermied horse suspended from a Baroque ceiling like a drooping chandelier, collapses both the martial pomposity of the Fascists and the futility of modern art to live up to classical architecture. " La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi" (2000) consists of a miniature doll representing the artist, suspended from a coat rack and dangling like an air-cured prosciutto. By 2011, when Mr. Cattelan opened his retrospective at the Guggenheim, he diminished all his previous works by suspending them from hooks in the center of the gallery, like laundry hung out to dry.

Suspension via duct tape, in particular, has a history in Mr. Cattelan's art. Perhaps the most important antecedent for the banana sculpture is his notorious " A Perfect Day " (1999), for which Mr. Cattelan used duct tape to fasten his dealer Massimo De Carlo to a white wall, who stayed taped above the ground for the show's opening day. The banana should be seen in the context of this earlier work, which places the art market itself on the wall, drooping and pitiful.

But perhaps you have read all this and thought: this Times critic is as bad as the poseurs at the fair! In which case you have already anticipated my second point: Mr. Cattelan directs these barbs at art from inside the art world, rather than lobbing insults from some cynical distance. His entire career has been a testament to an impossible desire to create art sincerely, stunted here by money, there by his own doubts.

Maurizio Cattelan's "We are the Revolution (La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi)" 2000, recalls Mr. Cattelan's decades-long reliance on suspension. Credit... Maurizio Cattelan, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

In this way Mr. Cattelan is wholly unlike Banksy, the ultra-bankable street artist whose default stance is populist mockery: using an auction house to sell a work that self-destructs, or selling a print of a painting sale with the title "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This ...." (The title has one unprintable last word.) Banksy's juvenile, notably British stance satisfies a dismayingly common belief that all artists are con artists, and that museums, collectors and critics are either dupes or hustlers. Indeed, it's exactly because of frauds like Banksy that audiences believed Mr. Cattelan arranged the theft of his own gilded commode in September from Blenheim Palace, as if every artist was putting something over.

Actually, real artists are not out to hoodwink you. What makes Mr. Cattelan a compelling artist, and what makes Banksy a tedious and culturally irrelevant prankster, is precisely Mr. Cattelan's willingness to implicate himself within the economic, social and discursive systems that structure how we see and what we value. It makes sense that an artist would find those systems dispiriting, and the duct-taped banana, like the suspended horse, might testify to his and all of our confinement within commerce and history. In that sense, the title "Comedian" is ironic - for Mr. Cattelan, like all the best clowns, is a tragedian who makes our certainties as slippery as a banana peel.

Mr. Cattelan's retrospective suspended exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in 2011. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

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A (Grudging) Defense of the $120,000 Banana (Published 2019)

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Maurizio Cattelan is more than a prankster, and "Comedian," his potassium-rich latest work, is more than an overpriced piece of fruit. Art may be long, and life short, but the existence of a hand fruit is most ephemeral of all.

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Surrealism is not a style – but a state of mind. It aims to subvert reality. To find the uncanny in the everyday. To tap into our unconscious desires and bring dreams to life. And for many artists around the world, it has been a way to challenge authority and imagine a new world.

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The feeling of slight dissatisfaction that can come with visiting a modern art gallery is a universal one, best articulated as "I could have done that".

A pair of US teenagers have beaten artists at their own game, pulling off a successful prank at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this week.

While Kevin Nguyen, 16, and TJ Khayatan, 17, were impressed with much of the art on display on their visit on Saturday, they questioned the artistic merits of some exhibits.

Could they do better?

Khayatan put Nguyen's glasses on the floor below an official-looking piece of paper to see how it would be received by gallery-goers.

The work seemed to hit a chord with the public, striking in its simplicity, yet - probably - a challenging commentary on the limits of individual perception.

Khayatan told BuzzFeed News that people gathered around the exhibit to view it and take photographs. He, in turn, took photographs of them admiring his work and later posted them to Twitter, where they went viral.

Nguyen shared images, too, noting the awkwardness of having to retrieve his glasses before they moved on in the museum.

@TJCruda the embarrassing part about it was walking back to pick it up and act like nothing happened
- galaxy (@k_vinnnn) May 24, 2016

The gallery's verified Twitter account drew its own parallels to other artists' work.

Twitter uses were keen to give their own interpretation - within the limitations of the 140-character limit.

Nguyen told Guardian Australia he and Khayatan were surprised by the reception.

"We thought it would only get maybe at most a couple hundred retweets, but hey, I have a pair of famous glasses on my face every day now!"

The "social experiment" immortalised in a Twitter moment - a commemoration of art in the digital age, you might say.

Nguyen said he had no intention of selling his now internet-famous eyewear - but he had an alternative idea.

"My glasses are Burberry, so a sponsorship would be nice," he joked.

Asked how he interpreted the "art piece", he suggested "the deeper meaning" could be about perception: "Anything in life can be art as long as you provide the insight and help people see what you see."

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Pair of glasses left on US gallery floor mistaken for art

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The feeling of slight dissatisfaction that can come with visiting a modern art gallery is a universal one, best articulated as "I could have done that". A pair of US teenagers have beaten artists at their own game, pulling off a successful prank at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this week.

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Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser - Exhibition at V&A South Kensington · V&A

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This immersive and theatrical show charts the evolution of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from manuscript to a global phenomenon beloved by all ages.

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The art of dreams: creativity through the unconscious | Art UK

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By the end of our lives, it is estimated that most of us will have spent 50,000 hours dreaming.

That is six years spent amongst the night-time phantasms which disturb, delight and perplex us. Formed in our minds and yet alien to them, the dream's enduring mysteries have long captivated artists and writers.

For some, as the apotheosis of the unbridled imagination, the dream represents art's origins. As French philosopher Michel Foucault expressed it, 'every act of imagination points implicitly to the dream... the dream is the first condition of its possibility.' No artists, perhaps, without dreamers.

The boundless capacity shared by the dream and the artistic imagination was vividly summoned in the chimeras of the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516), in which humans morph with magnified molluscs and galivant beneath palatial vegetable life, as seen in the late fifteenth-century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Though dream depiction was common during the Renaissance, Bosch's wild embrace of nocturnal irrationality was remarkable for its time. Portrayals of biblical or legendary dreams were instead the model, with God's dictum delivered to sleeping saints. Shown in repose beneath the subject of their slumbering mind, these sleepers would wake to new moral understanding.

With time came the increasing secularisation of dreams, a shift seen in two of their best-known representations, made within 20 years of one another: Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare (1781) which enraptured audiences at the 1782 Royal Academy Exhibition, and Goya's print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799, from his series 'Los Caprichos').

Like their religious forebears, these sleepers are portrayed beneath their dreams. Yet these nightmares are neither prophetic nor divine, but instead insist upon their private and visionary nature.

This irrational subjectivity of dreaming was at the heart of eighteenth-century Romantic thought. Guests' dreams were the subject of conversation at the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Thursday evening dinner parties, while the variety brought on through opium use was immortalised in works such as Coleridge's Kubla Khan (1816) and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

The work of another Romantic, William Blake (1757-1827), is permeated by dreams and visions. Yet they were not only the subject of his work, but also influenced its form, for it was in a dream that his brother, following his death, revealed the pioneering printing method for which Blake would become renowned. This experience is perhaps reflected in Blake's depictions of John Milton and John Bunyan receiving dreamt poetic inspiration, seen in his watercolour illustrations for the nineteenth-century edition of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

As the Victorians tutted into view, such rhapsody over the dream was restrained. Explosions in psychological enquiry saw nightly sojourns into absurd and dangerously immoral terrain discounted as the inconsequential refuse of minds disordered by physiological imbalances, such as indigestion.

Enter the cheese dream, a slice of which we see in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), as Ebenezer Scrooge declares of Marley's ghost: 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

The consequences of heavy suppers found their greatest artistic expression in Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). This early piece of cinema used the dream as the ideal device through which to exhibit the spectacular feats of the new medium, as the dreamer soars above the city after having gorged to excess on the titular dish.

Indeed, in its early days, cinema was frequently compared to the dream, with cinemas known as 'Dream Theatres', and Hollywood as the 'Dream Factory'.

Through the ages, dreams have acted as a mirror of their time's religion, rationality, or retreat into the absurd. Yet for over a century, Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) has remained lodged in the western imagination, with art and literature following suit.

The novelty of Freud's theory was his belief in an unconscious - a vast psychological realm housing primal drives and desires which escaped in disguised form during sleep as the dream. For Freud, the dream operated on two levels: that of the manifest content (its imagery), and the masked latent dream-thoughts. Through the free association of dream interpretation, psychoanalysis sought to decode the manifest content and discover the meanings lurking below.

Sergei Pankejeff's boyhood dream of wolves seated in a tree led to Freud calling him 'Wolf Man' following an infamous interpretation of his dream as containing the repressed memory of his parents having sex. A painting of the dream by Pankejeff is housed in London's Freud Museum.

Freud's work was taken up most enthusiastically by the Surrealists, for whom dreaming represented total liberation from social, scientific and aesthetic strictures. Following the horror of the First World War, the dream was prized for its disruptive force as a challenge to the quotidian. In the 'First Surrealist Manifesto' (1924), the movement's founder André Breton (1896-1966) declared, 'I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality'. For the Surrealists, dream and reality existed on the same plane.

Artists such as Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Max Ernst (1891-1976), René Magritte (1898-1967) and, perhaps most famously, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) painted from within the dreamworld, revelling in its nonsensical, erotic and eerie resonances. They had, thought Freud, rather missed the point. A meeting between Freud and Dalí in 1938 left the former perplexed - though it also left us an exquisite portrait of the master by the acolyte.

Freud was not, he felt, 'destined to understand' Surrealism. A letter sent to Breton stated the problem plainly: 'I ask you to note that the interpretation of what I call the manifest dream has no interest for me... I can hardly imagine what it would mean to anyone.' Quite the rebuke from one who felt himself unwillingly designated the group's 'patron saint'.

Undeterred, Dalí would go on to craft the dream in three dimensions in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), a thriller centring on the attempts of a psychoanalyst to unearth her amnesiac lover's repressed psycho-history. It is Dalí's dreamscape, featuring a masked face strikingly similar to Magritte's veiled faces in (1928), which provides the clues she needs to solve the puzzle.

A century on, and painters continue to work in this tradition of the chance associations and curious imagery of the dream. The pregnant atmospheres of Gabriella Boyd's paintings, in which humans and their traces hover in tension with illusory spaces, illustrated a 2015 Folio Society edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. Mary Stephenson's canvases see figures emerging from dark voids engaged in delirious acrobatics, often contrasted with the stillness of sleeping figures from whose imaginations they seem to spring.

It is often said that there is nothing duller than to be told someone else's dreams. Yet throughout history, artists have shown that to meet the dreamworld in artistic form is quite the reverse - a source of visual splendour, through which our waking world is seen anew.
Chloe Nahum, PhD candidate at the University of Oxford
Further reading
Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volumes IV and V, Vintage Books, 2001

Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty, Dreams and Modernity, Routledge, 2013

Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Anthony Stevens, Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming, Harvard University Press, 1995

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The art of dreams: creativity through the unconscious | Art UK

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By the end of our lives, it is estimated that most of us will have spent 50,000 hours dreaming. That is six years spent amongst the night-time phantasms which disturb, delight and perplex us. Formed in our minds and yet alien to them, the dream's enduring mysteries have long captivated artists and writers.

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Person’s sense of self
Connections
Culture
Upbringing
Environmental surroundings

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What makes something Art?
Who decides what is Art?
What is the life span of ART
Is Art an Illusion?
Why are we considering these questions?
Is art an expression of the unconscious mind?

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abstract art, modern/contemporary art

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Surrealism: balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.
Dream-like scenes and symbolic images, distorted figures and bizarre imagery.
Artists: Salvador Dali: the persistence of memory, Frida Kahlo: The broken column
Distortions
Memory
Perceived as unrealistic
Unexpected
Unconventional
Strange beauty

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distortion, self image? body image? beauty standards?, installation, Yayoi Kusama infinity rooms

fun fair mirror mazes

links to reflections and identity