"What’s your dream life like?”
It sounds like an innocent piece of conversation, but when Adam Haar Horowitz, a scientist of dreams, put the question to me, I realized how revealing any complete answer would be, and also how impossible it would be to describe the worlds full of aesthetic marvels, of nearly long-forgotten and sometimes imaginary people, of bizarre or occasionally quite ordinary situations so pressing with emotion that I still experience the feelings on waking up. Instead I stumbled over a description of how detailed the visual aspects of my dreams are, with clothing, jewelry, architecture, and artworks I wish I could put on paper but whose intricacy is far beyond my ability to sketch.
The dream bed created by Adam together with the artist Carsten Höller at Art Basel in Miami
The dream bed created by Adam together with the artist Carsten Höller was an experience I couldn’t miss. I’ve long believed that dreams are a key to our subsconscious and through them we are able to access greater creativity alongside knowledge of our physical and emotional selves that we don’t register when awake, and even alternate visions of how we might understand time, as my occasionally prophetic dreams have proved to me. I practiced lucid dreaming when I was younger to help take the sting out of a plague of nightmares I was experiencing. More recently, I have been trying to revive that practice in order to get to some answers about a chronic pain condition I have that doctors can’t seem to solve. Dreams are a subject of inquiry I’m always looking to dive into deeper — a tool for self-knowledge as well as for understanding the outer limits of the human mind.
But when I arrived to the Fondation Beyeler I was as nervous as I was excited to try out the dream bed. A now worrying large number of people had told me they wanted to hear about what my dreams would be like, and I wanted to have something interesting to report, especially for Adam and Carsten.
Sometimes my dreams were fascinating or revelatory; sometimes they were utterly banal. Sometimes I didn’t even remember them. What would happen when I suddenly had an audience for my dreams? Could I induce myself to have interesting dreams, the way lucid dreaming had shown me how to pierce through nightmares? Could the set-up of the bed — the red spotlit images of the mushroom tumbling overhead, Adam’s voice instructing me to dream of flying with a fly agaric — induce the kind of dreams that would be worth reporting? And had I drank too much wine at dinner? I’d arrived to the museum almost at midnight, tipsy enough that I seriously evaluated climbing over the gate when I couldn’t, at first, find the open entrance.
After I located the proper entrance, the security guard was kindly — when I’d prepared myself, he set me up and closed the curtain to the circular bedroom that had been erected in the museum. It was akin to being tucked in by a friendly stranger. Soon Adam’s voice began, familiar but disembodied, telling me reassuring facts about dream induction. The mushroom danced overhead, seeming to be a completely different and more ethereal object than the stage-prop presence of the mushroom as I’d seen it earlier, hanging still on fishing line. The bed: was it moving? I wasn’t entirely sure in the moment, but it was in fact rocking me to sleep.
It was surprisingly easy to sleep in such an alien environment, despite the feeling of being the subject of a wild science experiment, yet the worry about my dreams never fully left me. I wanted so much to dream a great dream of flying with a fly agaric mushroom, but I could feel my heart was beating faster than normal all night, and that I could never quite slide into the part of my brain where my fully immersive dreams happen. Instead I had just brief glimpses of dreams — visions of stories that never became the kind of complex, untethered narratives that happen in my more interesting dreams. I would wake occasionally and repeat the dream I had just seen to myself over and over again so as not to forget it.
The first one, around the time when Adam’s voice woke me up, was very beautiful though. There was a hill that was completely covered with mushrooms, seen from an aerial point of view. Their caps were brown instead of red, but spotted, recalling the fly agaric, and they had bulbous rounded tops which were squished together as tight as tiles. I wasn’t in this dream but the view of it was from the sky, and above the hillside of mushrooms was lavender-colored fog through which the vantage point looked over everything.
At the top of the hill, the mushrooms started to separate slightly, just enough to make out that they were no longer mushrooms, but rather very small and similarly round-shaped rabbits — hundreds of them. There was a woman at the bottom of the mushroom side of the hill, an elongated woman who looked to be from the turn of the last century, very Jungendstil, with a voluminous hat on top of a big chiffon hairdo, and a long white dress with an intricate lace blouse underneath. She was carrying a basket to pick mushrooms, not knowing they turned into rabbits, and was the first of a mushroom hunting party that I never saw the rest of.
There was another brief dream where I was teaching my mother to walk a tightrope, like you sometimes see people doing between trees in the park. Not flight, but close to flight for an 81-year-old.
And after I woke up in the morning and stayed in bed, the red light mushroom process started up again alongside some more discernable movements of the bed, and then I had a lot of visions — of floating on the sea surrounded by fly agarics the size of the one above the bed, of climbing inside the squishy stalk of a giant mushroom from the bottom and being engulfed in its gravity-less squishy innards, and even of being fully buffeted up from the ground on the wind as the bed was rocking. Not flight, but close.
I got up and went to the hotel nearby to shower, sending a note to Carsten about the dreams before they disappeared, still worried they weren’t interesting enough and weren’t as textured as my dreams generally are, because my anxiousness kept me from sleeping deeply. But when I later sat in the garden of the Beyeler with Adam and recounted my dreams for him, he pulled out a small object from his wallet — a rounded little figurine, brown and spotted and revealing itself to be a rabbit. The rabbit’s near-twin partner, he told me, was a similarly rounded and spotted brown mushroom that he had gifted to a child the night before. It was as if I had somehow conjured the contents of Adam’s pockets in my dream, which seems too mystical a conclusion, but also presents too strong a case to be brushed off as coincidence.
Just as fascinating for me though were the lingering effects of my night in the dream bed. Concentrating so hard on the experience of dreaming and having that guided experience had the effect of long lucid-dream training concentrated into a single night. Subsequently, I had countless flight-adjacent or weightlessness dreams — gliding in the air along miles of zip-line through a Swiss-looking city, floating in a pool with half my body supported on a floating sheet of glass, getting vertigo from looking out at the vast sky and landscape from the open 70th floor of a skyscraper.
And ten days after the dream bed experience, for the first time ever and after years of trying, I dreamed about my pain condition — just that it existed, which it never did previously in my dreams. I was running, slapping my bare feet on the cement sidewalk, and could feel them burning with pain, as they often do in real life. In another, me and a herd of horses were swimming together deep underwater, but it was making my body hurt. Then, other nights, I dreamed of almost-answers to the mysterious question of what’s plaguing me — like an award show where a tuxedoed man was opening an envelope that would reveal what was wrong with me, but I woke up just before he read the note. In another dream, I got an answer — selenium, the word on my lips when I woke up — but I looked up selenium and can’t see any way this would relate to my condition.
Only now, a month and a half later, have the effects worn off and my dreams returned to normal, but I hope to try the dream bed again, and maybe dream of a genuine answer to my problem after another of its dream-enhancing sessions.
About the dreamer
Related Resonance
