Dreamers of the 21st Century is a large scale, collaborative portrait of contemporary dream life. Through shared stories and creative research, the project explores the ways that dreams can connect individual experience with broader social and political realities.

We treat dream material as a unique form of testimony. Narrating a dream follows the unique patterns of individual memory, but these experiences also contain important transpersonal material: the cloth of our dreamscapes is woven from the life worlds we inhabit.

We work with dreams, and all the associations they elicit, to reveal the ways that individual stories are bound up with history writ large. And together with our community partners, we use this collective dreamwork to help envision new ways of thinking and being.

Methodology

Dreamers of the 21st Century works intimately with our collaborators to ensure a balanced research partnership. The first phase of our project focuses on peoples and communities who have been directly impacted by various forms of systemic inequality, including refugees and migrants, Indigenous communities, queer and trans people, substance users, and the unhoused. The principles of equity, dignity, sustainability, and justice guide the co-creation of our data.

We use different data visualization methods to showcase the dreamers and connect the dream material to the social situation in which it arose. The visual design of the project is inspired, in part, by August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, an enormous photographic archive of German society organized by social groups. Sander’s method involved working with individuals to create a larger portrait of an age. In a 1951, he wrote:

A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography... I would very much like to show my work again, but I cannot show it in a single photo, nor in two or three, after all, they could just as well be snapshots. Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.

Alongside Sander’s concept of a social mosaic, our project is inspired by mycelial networks. Mycelium is the root-like structure of a fungus that is woven into the earth’s substrate, of which mushrooms are the “fruit.” Sigmund Freud explicitly described dream life in terms of the mycelial network. In his view, a singular dream is like a mushroom that springs up from a vast underground meshwork of connected ideas akin to mycelium.

Many Indigenous scientists and Knowledge Keepers consider the mycelial network as a foundational ecological knowledge system: a vast database that reveals the interwoven nature of our lives, cultures, and environments. Inspired by both Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Dreamers of the 21st Century works with dream life to better understand our radical interconnectedness, and to visualize the vast network that sustains us.