Don´t Wake Up! Future Dreaming in the Arts

The interconnection of sleep and dreams is experiencing a surge of interest across the sciences, arts, and the wellness industry, in contrast to the previous understanding of sleep as uneventful and subordinate to the state of being awake. Artists translate these discourses, in both their scientific and popular versions. The project researches three interlinked fields: (1) politics and aesthetics of sleep and dreams, (2) decolonizing sleep in terms of body- politics and epistemic disobedience, and (3) dreaming as incubator for visionary artistic and media-technological inventions. In Western natural science, a skepticism towards subjective, inner experiences exist, and yet it has changed profoundly during history. Early romantic authors already focused on dreams to reconcile subjective and poetic experience with science. In the 1960s hippie culture renewed the interest in drug-induced dream experiences beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, which nowadays are incorporated into immersive media technology. Contemporary artists experiment with employing dreams as creative raw materials, decolonizing sleep, and hybrid stagings. Insofar as decolonization is not only critical cognitive work, but also a bodily process and critique of technology, it is significant to analyze artistic practices in this field. The project defines itself through a series of interlocking core fields, designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions. The disciplines are theater and performance studies and media-cultural studies informed by postcolonial and queer theory. These fields are connected to approaches from neuroscientific, technological, and philosophical sleep and dream research, when applicable. The project starts with the following research questions: first, how does the notion of observing the dreaming self, relate to problems of scientific objectivity and artistic research? How does staging sleep involve attempts of representing inner and outer worlds, simulation, and immersion? Second, it explores the racialized, gendered history of sleep through science and colonial medicine and how this history is challenged in the present by artists. Third, it connects these findings to analysis to immersive media techniques (e.g. virtual reality) that evoke hallucinatory and dream-image-driven perceptual processes and asks how these are used as models and what impact they can have on new perspectives of action. The innovative aspect of the project is the connection of ostensibly disparate fields, thereby tending to so far under-researched areas, and creating transdisciplinary relationships between arts and sciences, while establishing an emerging field of knowledge. The results will offer significant insights for current discussions in theater and performance theory, media and art theory.