A key to creativity, dreams and their visual expressions attest to the power of the imaginary. This book, like the major exhibition it accompanies, focuses on the mysterious and often fantastical images experienced in dreams. Crossing boundaries of time and geography, Lucid Dreams investigates dreams in art, material culture, and new media from a multicultural perspective. It traverses historical eras to present artifacts, artworks, and religious objects that span the globe, alongside works in myriad techniques by artists from the last three centuries, from Goya’s powerful Sleep of Reason through Surrealist visions to contemporary creations. All of these express humanity’s never-ending desire to touch the dream and interpret it.

This lavishly illustrated, innovatively designed publication is organized into sections reflecting key themes: Architecture of Dreams, Centenary of Surrealism, The Sleep of Reason, Active Imagination, and Interpretation of Dreams. Following a seminal essay by the late artist Susan Hiller, the texts of eminent scholars and art historians, psychologists and scientists explore different aspects of the dream, with each section ending in a kaleidoscope album of artworks and objects, many of them elucidated by curatorial texts or original artist statements.

Lucid Dreams invites you to shift consciousness and enter spaces of reverie, to delve into the individual and collective unconscious, and to immerse yourself in the transformative power of art.

Date of publication: 2024

Number of pages: 208 (English)
Dimensions: 28 x 21.7 cm
Cover: Semi-hard
Languages: English, Hebrew