DB: Communal Dreams suggests that dream content can be influenced through designed sensory cues. At what point does this shift from observing dreams to actively engineering them?
CH: It doesn’t, really. Engineering involves absolute control, and dreaming resists control in a way that I find very beautiful. Adam Haar and I use a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation — light, sound, spoken words uttered at specific moments of sleep onset. In Dream Hotel Room #1: Dreaming of Flying With Flying Fly Agarics, we suggested flying with fly agarics. Sixty-seven percent of sleepers reported flying dreams. We published this result in a journal of the American Psychological Association – as far as we can tell, this is the first paper of its kind to produce real, serious science from data collected at an art exhibition like this. However, this is not absolute control – what they jumped on, what they felt, whether they were scared or ecstatic – completely unpredictable. I spent years studying insect communication, where you send a flying signal and get a behavioral response. Dreams aren’t like that. You send a signal and the unconscious does what it wants with it. That’s why I find it more interesting than controlling stimulus input and behavior output.
Carsten Höller, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, 2024installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel © Carsten Höller. Photo: Mark Niedermanncourtesy Beyeler Foundation
DB: The project was developed with researchers studying dream incubation, a technique that attempts to guide the themes that people experience when they sleep. How has working with scientists changed the way you think about dreams as an artistic medium?
CH: When I was a scientist, subjective experience was forbidden as a given. You could study the olfactory response of an insect, but your own perception of the experiment was irrelevant. When I started making art, I wanted to bring back exactly what had been forbidden — the first person. Not just my first person, but subjective experience in general. Now, working with Adam and the MIT researchers on Dream Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, I find myself in an interesting position: working with scientists who have found rigorous methods for studying the subjective. They can detect the onset of sleep from brain waves, know when a dream is just beginning, intervene at the right microsecond, and then ask: what did you experience? The dream report becomes data. It changes both what art is and what science is willing to deal with.
the facility accommodates three participants at a time in a shared sleeping structure
DB: Dreams are usually considered the most private of experiences, yet this installation invites strangers to sleep together and potentially share dream themes. What fascinates you about the idea of the collective dream?
CH: With Rosemarie Trockel, I built the House for Pigs and People at documenta X in 1997, where people watched pigs. The audience thought they were watching the animals. But of course the real question was: who is the animal and who is the observer? Communal Dreams has a similar inversion. You think this universe of sleep is private, the mind is yours alone, even when you sleep with strangers. But the really disturbing thing is that when three people receive the same sensory cue and three of them dream that they are in a tunnel, on a train, the red lights are flashing as they go by – you don’t know if this is neurology or something else. I am dissatisfied with the given of what we accept as individual experience. The installation does not prove that the dream is collective. It creates the conditions under which you can no longer be sure that it is not.
Pulses of light, ambient sound and subtle movement are calibrated to affect dream states in real time
DB: Many of your projects act as experiments where the outcome is uncertain and the participants become part of the process. Do you think this installation is a work of art, a science experiment, or something else?
CH: The real material I work with is people’s experience — and in the case of Communal Dreams, people’s experience is people’s dreams. Dreams are collected, transcribed, studied. Some will appear in a peer-reviewed paper. Some, a person will carry with them for years. Peer-reviewed and personally powerful. I would like both things to be true at the same time, because I think the separation between them has always been artificial.
drawing on research from the MIT Media Lab and Harvard
DB: The installation turns the museum into a place where visitors are invited to sleep. How does this reversal challenge the role of the museum as a site of conscious attention?
CH: My first overwhelming museum experience was at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I was alone. The paintings did something to my perception that I couldn’t explain and didn’t want to explain. When I saw a Rothko exhibition years later in a packed room at the Tate, with everyone paying attention, the effect was not the same. I’ve always disliked the idea that the museum asks you to be a conscious, upright, attentive viewer. There is a social norm that exists in how we are meant to interact with the artwork. The most interesting perceptual states—doubt, vertigo, hypnagogia, to name a few—occur when this straightness, these rules, break down. At Communal Dreams, guests lie down, close their eyes and become the work. In the realm of dreams there is no straightness. The work in Communal Dreams is made in the unstable in-between, somewhere between the physical sculpture and the viewer’s mind, between the viewers and each other, in the moment of being transported into another world by something as simple as a passing red light. The museum does not lose its purpose. It becomes a space of experience with purely internal attention and no rules, only stimuli.
work contexts sleep as a porous, collective experience
DB: During your practice you often construct environments that change states of mind. Do you see dreams as another kind of architecture, existing entirely within the brain?
CH: George Stratton, in the 1890s, wore reversing lenses for four days until his brain turned the world back. This experiment fascinated me because it proved that perception is a construction — the brain builds the world it expects, and by holding the expectation we can reverse the whole world. My upside-down glasses, my moving hotel rooms, these are architectural suggestions to this brain that builds and waits. Dreams are a step further, in the brain that constructs without expectations. Only memory, only emotion, only the remnant of the day, only possibility. And he builds entire cities, entire strangers with their own motivations. This architecture is more expansive than anything we can build in steel or glass. Spaces built by dreams, not for. And so Communal Dreams is metal and glass built as an invitation to the most powerful architect, the architect of dreams.
external stimuli and the presence of others penetrate the subconscious
DB: If technologies for influencing dreams continue to develop, they could eventually be used beyond artistic contexts. Do you see this work opening up a speculative discussion about the future ethics of shaping the human imagination?
CH: This is not for profit. Gordon Wasson, among others, documented cultures where the content of dreams was a shared resource, shaped by ritual, by mushrooms, by shared intention. The idea that dreams are untouchable private territory is historically very recent and probably false — information, media, screens already shape what the mind does when it drifts. The question is not whether dreams will be affected but by whom and for what purpose. I prefer to address this within an art context because a work of art suggests an experience – it does not obtain it, at least not commercially. But of course we are very uncomfortable in our culture with unpredictability, and dreams are one of the last unpredictable things. I would be very unhappy to see them domesticated. This project and the larger Dream Hotel project with Adam uses science to plant a seed in the unconscious – a seed of movement, a seed of flight – but as anyone who has a garden knows, a seed is not an instrument of control. A seed is a way of making something in cooperation with an existing substrate, a way of getting to know the soil. Incubating a dream is about the same. Dream Hotel offers seeds, guests come and plant them (a sound, a sight, a smell) in their unconscious and in doing so become aware of the substrate of themselves. Without intentional tools to interact with this part of our perception – the unconscious – we just have to take it for granted.
the installation is based on recent studies suggesting that dreams can be guided and even partially synchronized
The dream sequences begin to overlap, producing fragments of a shared narrative
the work extends Höller’s long-standing interest in altered perception
