early 15c., "thicken, make more dense or compact", from Old French condenser (14c.) or directly from Latin condensare, from com-, + densare "make thick," from densus "dense, thick, crowded," a word used of crowds, darkness, clouds, etc.
Image: Fragment ofThe Dream of Saint Joseph, Georges de La Tour, 1628 - 1645; Font:Cruder, Hyunjun Jang, 2018DreamXchange
Weekly meetings to share and discuss dreams of the past week exploring Dreams as Tales, that might reflect our inner and outer world(s). The group also offers a place to exchange exercises in Lucid dreaming and any research conducted on or within dreams.
Entering each others dreamscapes, archiving and discussing common tropes as well as comparing its fabric to the records of past generations, we try to listen to dreams as tales. How do they narrate our present and allow access to a collective memory that may haunt it?
dreamXchange follows the vein of previous projects* that have studied dreams to examine a hypothesized collective unconscious.
The dreamXchange public program during the months of November 2023 to February 2024. It invites four artists, researchers, healers, tricksters or mythical figures are invited to guide the participants through a 2-3 hour session loosely based on the structure of the regular dream sharing sessions and the speaker's own approach to social dreaming and (collective) dream work.
* Examples (listed below) are Charlotte Beradt’s ’The Third Reich of Dreams’ (1966) a collection of dreams gathered during the 2nd World War in Germany or the amassing of COVID dreams by the London Museum in a project called ‘Guardians of Sleep’. Both projects record the effects of societal upheaval on the unconscious.
Dream Dungeon is a Role Play Game that lets you (re)enter and explore a collective dreamscape. Connecting and merging the different dream locations in a growing underground architecture, it provides a place for a fictional tale to unfold through free association. Players may choose a character that has appeared in any of the shared dreams to follow and find out more about their desires, fears, and questions. In the dream dungeon, the individual dreamer dissolves in a trip of transindividual memory and reflection.
Dormant Territory is a workshop hosted by the research group dreamXchange and extends their weekly dream sharing meetings and oneirotopia methodology to a larger audience. Oneirotopia makes use of nonlinear storytelling, positive conspiracy and the method of loci. In three consecutive parts the workshop will uncover and construct a multitude of superimposed topologies that the participants connect through liminal portals. The workshop builds on our experience of creating LARPs (Live Action Role Plays) and worldbuilding workshops.
Image: It looked like an embrace, Koma Somnus; 2020, Font:Krungthep
Dream Tapestry is a collective sharing session weaving together dreamscapes and real-world landscapes, initiated by Koma Somnus a character that is collectively conceived and nurtured during the dreamXchange sessions. The feature-length walk is an invitation to listen to and share fragments of past dreams while moving through a chosen environment, blending memories with live impressions of the immediate surroundings.
Dates:
29th of April, 2021, on discord, hosted by the Ashley Berlin
Koma Somnus (*19987) is an artist and researcher based in the oneirotopia feed harvested from collective dreamscapes. They are interested in digital game play, video game realism, digital materialism, pseudo-experiments, reciprocal practices between humans, software tools and care work, the co-constitution of memory and trauma, the mutation of written language in programming environments, collective imagination and mythology, the visual properties of abstract systems and collective worldbuild.
LINKS:
Baratto&Mouravas
Artist duo navigating Archaeodreaming, a multi-disciplinary methodology that merges archaeology with dreamscape-making. Their work recounts narratives integrating history, mythology, material memory, personal dreams, and collective imagination.
COVID Dreams
Millions of people around the world weave the horrors of COVID-19, into their dreams, exposing feelings of fear, loss, isolation and grief in a way that transcends culture, language and national boundaries. Humanity has rarely experienced “collective dreaming” on such a broad scale in recorded history — at least never while also being able to share those nightmares in real time.
Deirdre Barrett, a Havard professor of Psychology researching on the connection of trauma and dreams, has created an online survey to collect the dreams of people living through the coronavirus pandemic.
DREAM WORKS
Three sessions of practice and experimentation with and in dreams: dreaming together, dreaming in the dreams of others, preparing dreams before and after being dreamed. Dreaming of art forms and as an art form. initiated by Galerie founders Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen.
Drawing made by Adriano and Simon transformed through Deep Dream Generators, Madrid, 2018Liminal Archives a global database of the strange and uncanny locations that blur the line between real and unreal. The archive operating as an open sandbox allowing users to add their findings through different ways of documentation and navigate through each others liminal locations in a hyptothetical gamespace composed of different levels.
ONEIRIC.SPACE is a research project dedicated to exploring our relationship to dreams and the unconscious through an interdisciplinary lens. It consists of the online magazine, a monthly newsletter, events and special projects.
Dream drawing, 2015READING:
‘The Third Reich of Dreams’ is a collection of seventy-five dreams, compiled by journalist Charlotte Beradt and smuggled out of Germany during the 1930s in code. Neither scientific study nor psychoanalytic text it is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s subconscious mind.
‘Social Dreaming’ by Susan Long & Julian Manley, 2018
reflects upon and extends the theory and philosophy behind the method of social dreaming which argues that dreams are relevant to the wider social sphere and have a collective resonance that goes beyond the personal narrative. The book offers an introduction into the principles of social dreaming and dives deeper into an epistemology to support the theoretical principles of the field, new research in the area, and how social dreaming practice is conducted in a range of localities, situations and circumstances.