INSTRUCTIONS:
1) Equip yourself with a notebook and pen.
2) On the evening of the first day, after the radio show introducing the workshop, concentrate on the very first images that form while you are falling asleep (hypnagogic hallucinations). These images are effervescent; try to capture one or several details and memorise them with the help of the notebook. It is based on these embryonic images that the lucid dream will be constructed from day to day.
3) Every subsequent evening, while you are falling asleep, recall the dream’s starting images, so they take shape in the dreams.
4) In the morning, or any time you wake up during the night, note your waking time and the images you remember.
5) While awake, observe if the dream images manifest themselves in the form of a memory, and try to find time during the day to evoke the images from the dreams: this process establishes links between your unconscious nocturnal activity and your conscious activity, and makes it possible to fix the images in your brain, so they can reappear at night.
6) Try to maintain a certain regularity in your sleeping and waking times during the experiment.
7) Always keep the notebook close to hand to note everything that happens in your unconscious linked with the dream you are in the process of constructing.
8) The experiment can be interrupted at any time. Though not obligatory, at least 21 days of practice are recommended, so the habit of lucid dreaming can start to settle in.
Collective dreams radio workshop – 21/12/2020
Can one intervene in the fortuitousness of the shared dreams that could be haunting us in this challenging time of widespread distancing, in order to direct and manipulate them, making them into collective lucid dreams?
Is it possible to share a methodology in such a way as to make “all psychisms communicate in a philosophy of rest?
In the early 2nd century, philosopher Artemidorus Daldianus began writing his principal work, Oneirocritica (The Interpretation of Dreams), a vast, carefully categorised compilation of dream narratives by Greeks and Romans of the time. From manure to flattery, from Apollo to ladders, one finds recurring images that seem to cross dreaming minds and skip from one dream experience to another, in accordance with a principle of communicating vessels, in which a socially defined and conscious community gives way to an undisciplined, random, nocturnal community.
In his 1867 work Dreams and Ways to Direct Them, Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys described a both intuitive and experimental method, for controlling dreams through the development of the active imagination, and for directly intervening in the creation of the dream story (lucid dreaming).
On this day of the winter solstice (Monday 21 December) and of the longest night of the year, the aim of this radio workshop is to collectively and remotely work on developing one or several collective lucid dreams.
Following this radio exercise with Meris Angioletti and Monica Fantini, over time, participants will be able to confidentially or anonymously share their dreams with the artist at this email address: [email protected].
The dreams collected in this way will be the transcription of an ephemeral community of dreamers and could inspire—through interpretation workshops, shared exercises or anonymous texts—the collective lucid dreams of other future communities, in accordance with a process of unconscious pollination.
[1] G. Bachelard, “Dreams and Radio”, in The Right to Dream [1970], Dallas, Dallas Institute Publications, 1988, p.169.
