Museums to collect Covid dreams from Londoners

The Museum of London has partnered with the Museum of Dreams, based at Western University in London, Canada, to launch an oral history project to collect the dreams of Londoners during the pandemic.

The Guardians of Sleep project is the first time a museum has collected dreams as “raw encounters” and personal testimonies. It will form part of the Museum of London’s wider Collecting Covid work, and also aims to offer insight into what dreams reveal about people’s mental health and ways of coping through a crisis.

The museums are currently seeking participants to take part in the work, before inviting them to speak about their Covid dreams and experiences during the pandemic in February 2021. The interviews will be conducted with a member of Museum of Dreams network, which is made up of trained scholars from the psychosocial community.

The conversations will last approximately 30 minutes over Zoom and will then be considered for acquisition into the Museum of London’s permanent collection.

“Collecting Londoners’ dreams in their own words not only allows us to document a key shared experience from the pandemic but also helps stretch the definition of a ‘museum object’, by adding dreams as raw encounters and personal testimonies to our permanent London Collection for the very first time,” said Foteini Aravani, the Museum of London’s digital curator.

Museums have traditionally collected dreams in the form of artistic impression such as paintings or drawings. But Aravani says this can often “dissociate the dream from the dreamer”.

The Guardians of Sleep project will aim to provide “a more emotional and personal narrative of this time for future generations”, she adds.

The Museum of Dreams is an online hub for exploring the social and political significance of “dream-life”. 

Its creator, Sharon Sliwinski, said: “This partnership with the Museum of London takes inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s description of dreams as the ‘guardians of sleep’ where dreams are seen as night watchmen helping to preserve the integrity of our mind, guarding over our capacity to articulate experiences in our own terms.

“Here dreaming is understood to be a symbolic process that helps us work through the struggles we face in our waking lives. This new research with the Museum of London as part of its Collecting Covid initiative aims to provide a rich resource for further understanding the significance of dream-life as a mechanism for working through social conflict and how the pandemic has affected the human condition.”

Members of the public who want to participate in the study should contact info@museumofdreams.org by 15 January 2021.