Lucid Dreams

Please note: Access to the exhibition is temporarily through the Modern Art galleries on the first floor

We sleep. Images appear in our mind’s eye. Scenes and sensations are seen, heard, felt: dreams, a creation of sleep. The unconscious speaks in symbols – as does art. Dreams and art open up transcendent spaces of healing.

Lucid Dreams engages with this universal theme, crossing boundaries of time and geography to investigate dreams in art, material culture, and new media from a multicultural perspective. It presents ancient headrests, illuminated Jewish, Islamic, and Christian manuscripts, Chinese dream stones and Japanese Zen prints together with works in a range of mediums by artists from the last three centuries, from Goya’s powerful Sleep of Reason through Surrealist visions to contemporary international and Israeli creations. All of these express humanity’s shared, never-ending desire to touch the dream and interpret it.

Celebrating the centenary of André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism and inspired by his Dream Object, the exhibition leads you through a long corridor to multiple “compartments” of the unconscious. These rooms echo the complexity of the human mind and the multifaceted nature of thoughts, emotions, and memories. We invite you to shift consciousness and immerse yourself in the transformative power of art.

Sharon Balaban, Israeli, born 1971

Mascara, 2024

Stills from 4K video installation, 4:54 mins.

Courtesy of the artist

© The artist

Photo © Sharon Balaban

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), British, 1832–1898

Xie Sleeping, 1874

Albumen print, 10.2 x 14.3 cm

The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum

B98.0108

Dina Goldstein, Israeli, born 1979

The Dreaming Room, 2024 (detail)

Papercut installation: mixed media including

furniture and sound

Courtesy of the artist

© The artist

Photo: © Dina Goldstein

Tal Shochat, Israeli, born 1974

Untitled, 2005

Chromogenic print, 124.5 x 124.5 cm

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: Purchase,

Marion and Guy Naggar Fund, London

© The artist

B06.0428

Claudia Davidoff, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in memory of Ruth and Leon Davidoff

Hanno D. Mott, New York

The Nash Family Foundation, New York

An anonymous donor

Additional support provided by:

The Aviv Foundation

FSJU - Fonds Social Juif Unifié – France & Israel