Moss Park Consumption & Treatment Service (CTS) is a supervised consumption site located in a downtown neighbourhood of Toronto. The site began operating in 2017, when community members and harm reduction workers organized an unsanctioned overdose prevention site at the south end of the park. This was a community-led response to a surge of overdose-related deaths in this downtown area of the city, run by more than 150 volunteers and operated out of tents.
The Moss Park site was the first of its kind in Ontario. People were able to consume previously obtained substances under the watch of volunteers trained to respond to overdose. Over the summer of 2018, the site became part of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) and was granted a federal exemption from Health Canada and received funding from the Ministry of Health. The Moss Park site continues to provide holistic, integrated, and trauma-informed healthcare and social services, including drug-checking.
Historically, Moss Park is one of the most economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Toronto. A recent study showed that Moss Park residents have the shortest life expectancy in the city. The COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated the toxic drug crisis. According to Toronto Public Health, in 2021, there were 601 opioid toxicity deaths across the city of Toronto. 102 of those deaths occurred in the downtown catchment that includes Moss Park.
In 2024, the provincial Health Minister introduced legislation prohibiting supervised consumption sites across the province. The legislation was immediately met with a constitutional challenge that argues the new law violates both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution.
In 2025, the Museum of Dreams partnered with Moss Park CTS to gather data about this community’s dream life as an alternative means to document the impact of this complex political situation. Dreams became tools for listening to a community’s heartbeat, a way to attend to lives marked by a series of devastated social bonds, seismic upheavals that are at once intimate, political, and historical.
In October 2025, we released a report on our study called, Moss Park CTS: The Collective Dreamwork of a Supervised Consumption Community
Read the Report →
Adam
“I've had so little energy I haven't even been able to grasp on to any of my dreams. They just, they kind of float in like an image and then they're gone again, because I've haven't been able to hold on to anything. My sleeping conditions are horrible. Worse than it's ever been.”
Akino
“You ever have a dream where you're falling? And they say if you hit the ground, you're dead? That's not true. Because I've dreamt that I’ve fallen in holes and they fill up with me in them and I'm still here. I got buried under the streetcar tracks. That's a real heavy dream. I wake up in a cold sweat with that one.”
Allison
“I don't dream at all. At least I don't think I dream at all. My husband died out here, six years ago. So, I'm not sure if that's due to him. I was always hoping I’d dream of him, you know, or he'd come see me. It’s kind of a thing in our culture. But I don't dream of him at all.”
Anthony
“When I was a kid I dreamt all the time. Just kid stuff, you know, like, riding a bike, you know, or going swimming, dancing to music, stuff like that. I've had quite a few dreams where I was kind of like Superman. I could like jump and like go long distances and yeah. Superman is cool. That guy could do anything back then, right? Nowadays in movies he can wind up dead.”
Damien
“My sleep is sporadic. It depends if I'm using or not. If I'm using, it's more of a deep sleep, or a knockout sleep, I guess you'd call it. I don't really remember much. My dream life is confusing, I guess. I find as I get older, dreams are kind of different. A lot of looking back on my past. I don't know if it's guiding me in the future or not, but I seem to have some dreams that, like, end up happening.”
Erin
“I had one particular dream about work that's really stuck with me, and it was one of those dreams where I woke up and I was like, “Oh, I'm supposed to hold onto this, this is like telling me something.” It stuck with me. It created some metaphorical texture, I guess, to something that we were experiencing together, but not necessarily talking about.”
Evan
“I don't drink anymore, but for a couple decades, I was I pretty heavy drinker. But there was this time in my twenties when I briefly stopped drinking, and it was just like a faucet had opened of dreams.”
Florence
“I need pills to sleep. Yeah. I can't, well, I can fall asleep, but it's so hard. I sleep less than is probably normal. I have a problem staying asleep. Things happened to me when I was a kid, and it was during the night. I got woken up. Not in such a good way. So, I think that might have something to do with me being unable to stay asleep. I don't know.”
Gabby
“I'm always thinking about my dreams, how they play out, why. What's happening during the present day or the days before? I'm gonna try to get as much rest as I can to untangle some of those thinking patterns that get me stuck and or the consuming thoughts that I have. Maybe it helped me process some things, think about the past.”
Heather
“I used to ride trains when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and shit. Before 9/11 it was a lot easier. We would go to Mexico and shit. It was easier to cross the borders. I don't know, we were just fuckin around, you know what I mean? Not that I miss those times, but I think my dreams feature a lot of geographical and memories from that time. I see a lot of freight train stuff in my dreams and shitty places in America.”
Ian
“For the most part, when I wake up, I'll forget my dreams within a few minutes. But what I do remember of my dreams, it's mostly about my children.”
John
“I ... had a dream a few years ago where I was a caveman and I didn't realize I was a caveman. It was really disturbing. I dunno why. Just looking at my reflection, you know, looking really hard and thinking that guy looks really familiar. And then I realized that it was in fact me I was looking at. It was about five years ago. I just started using opiates around that time. Not being able to recognize myself is another kind of theme I've had during the length of the drug use.”
Justin
“I was in jail for about a year, so throughout that year I experienced different kinds of dreams that I’d never experienced before. Dreams where I even knew I was dreaming.”
Kelly
“I had one dream that really scared me though. I don't wanna sound a little off the wall, but I mean, I was living at the Bond Hotel at the time. A lot of deaths happened there. But what happened is I could've sworn I was awake, but there was this person on top of me, like sitting on my chest and they wouldn't get off. Like, they wouldn't get off. I think something was trying to take over me, and it wasn't... it wasn't friendly.”
Keren
“I started having these dreams in COVID—vivid dreams—that I'd given people the wrong vaccine. I feel like I was having these dreams during COVID because we were having so much death. So much death. There'd be days that would go by in this building where it felt like every day, somebody we knew was dead. Another person we knew was dead every single day. And I would have these dreams where it felt like Sarah and all the other staff, we were literally human break-walls. We were standing in water, deep water that was just like blowing us away and we were trying to stay standing.”
Kyra
“I sleep in little bits throughout the day, but a lot of them. It affects how I remember my dreams. I most likely dream, but I don't remember them. I get, like, little glimpses of them here and there. But I never get to see how my dreams end.”
Lynn
“I dream a lot about my family. I lost my whole family pretty much back-to-back. Like, my sister, my brother, my mom, all died two and a half years ago. The same year, same month, a week apart. And then a year later, my brother. And then a year after that, my son's father.”
Mike G.
“It seems to me like I have a lot of regrets and stuff in my life, so I think I'm always thinking about the past quite often. That's why I seem to dream a lot about that. About my kids. Mistakes I made in the past.”
Mikey S.
“I'm 46, but I feel a little bit older, right? Maybe being on the streets is kicking my butt a little. But, you know, one day I'll be able to lock a door again and be able to relax and possibly have a nice dream.”
Mugzy
“I believe dreams are not something that your imagination is creating, it's actually, like, passing information. Or something you are actually going through, you know what I mean? It's not like an imagined thing. It's something that's spiritually connected. I started getting into my culture and to the spirituality of things and started talking to elders in medicine. That's why I say dreams are very powerful. You have to look at them and what they mean, and you know, they're happening for a reason.”
Noel G.
“There's something special about sharing dreams. I've never talked about the potted witch dream outside my family, so sharing it in this way feels new. Like putting it somewhere. That feels special. Having a conversation about that dream has changed it somehow.”
Sandy
“I don’t remember my dreams. I used to when I was younger, until I started using lots of drugs, uh, pharmaceuticals, alcohol. Since I started using, that's when I started like, just like not dreaming, really.”
Sarah
“The best conversations happen in this place. I have more real conversations with people here than I do in other parts of my life. There's a lot of small talk that exists in adult life and I actually despise it. But people here will talk about meaningful things—spirituality and dream life. I think that's also because the people that come here have had more immersive life experiences than the rest of the general public. A lot of experiences and a lot of near-death experiences that other people haven't. I wonder if that's the key: being so close to death and experiencing near death yourself. I wonder if that opens something else up in your brain. Allows for a different type of dream.”
Scotian
“I never remember dreams. Hardly ever. And if I do dream it's like, the dream would have to be very significant in some sort of fashion. Because it's uncommon for me to remember them.”
Sean
“Most times I get dreams. Even if I take naps. Some of them are just so real. I see… like, how do you say this—I see like, visions, too. I see it before it comes, it tells me something's gonna happen later, in the future.”
Texas
“Usually I don't even remember my dreams because I crash so hard that the only time I wake up and remember a dream most of the time is when I'm falling off of something and before I hit the ground I wake up.”
Tim
“In the last couple of years, since COVID, a lot of things went on. I started having more, they were more like, heavy nightmares, but I wasn't scared at all. I'm just seeing things, horrible, horrible things. It was very sad, very gloomy. I've had some serious visions, you know, but just things that have happened, you know what I mean?”
Toronto research team: Noel Glover (Moss Park CTS), Sarah Grieg (Director Moss Park CTS), Melinda Josie (Illustrator), Seff Pinch (Moss Park CTS), Sharon Sliwinski (Western University).
Spot illustrations by Melinda Josie.
Illustrated names by Heather MacKay-Lams.