Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics (2024) is an artwork based on the latest advances in the neuroscience of dreaming. Art offers us structure to explore other realities, ripe with generative impossibility, unfamiliar meaning and fertile doubt. Dreaming does the same.
In this piece Carsten Höller and Adam Haar guide sleeping museum visitors to have flying dreams. This is done by introducing sound, sight and somatic stimulation during sleep. Recent research in the field of Dream Engineering, focused on the use of technology to change the content of dreams, has shown that the brain continues to listen, feel, and see during sleep. This discovery has opened up channels to communicate with the unconscious mind which have never existed before.
This piece brings Dream Engineering into the museum and offers visitors new tools to explore their own dreams. The installation involves two primary components: a bed designed for rocking participants into sleep and during sleep, and a rotating fly agaric mushroom replica designed to stimulate targeted dream content.
Methods
Once the sleeper gets into bed they will see the spinning fly agaric replica lit by a fast-moving red light at 700 nm wavelength and 4 hz frequency, inducing the illusion of seeing it ”flying”. This wavelength of light is based on studies demonstrating such light cues can reliably create lucid dreams; In these studies, flashing red lights pass through closed eyelids of sleepers and are incorporated into dreams in a remarkable variety of ways, including scenes of flashing red thunderstorms and pulsating red train cars.
When the sleeper enters deep sleep, the bed will begin moving, following the path of the flying mushroom above, first softly and later in a more accentuated way, to help elicit and direct flying dreams. Bed rocking has been shown to quicken the onset of sleep and to promote deep sleep; Past studies have shown that changing the physical sensations in a sleepers body can direct their physical experiences in dreams and create sensations including flying. At the same time, acoustic stimulation will reinforce the sleepers imagination with the words ”flying with flying fly agarics”. This sound stimulation is part of a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation, in which sound is used to create half-awakenings in sleepers and to inject specific themes into dreams. This half-awake state, where thoughts and images are one, is the most fertile ground for guiding dreams.
This artwork uses the sleeping body as an interface to the dreamt body to engender new experiences of liminal consciousness, dream control, and flying dreams. Experiences of flying dreams is linked with increased dream recall frequency, augmented dream lucidity, reduced hypnotic susceptibility, increased spiritual beliefs, and waking feelings of self-transcendence and empowerment.
