PERFORMANCE ESSAY

A multi-night mystery school where you don’t get in trouble falling asleep in “class!” (because your dreams are the only teachers)….

A slumber party for artists.

A studio for sleepers.

A playboratory for dreamers.

A somnolent summit for concerned Earthlings.

Climate change has been oft-described as a NiGHTmaRe. We need solutions. So it’s time to wake up and sleep on it! I propose a “temporary autonomous zone” over the course of the festival for folks to sleep, perchance to dream about what restorative beauty they can give to this Unraveling Moment. In this soporific salon we’ll share dream seductions/experiments as well as poetic in(terr)ventions for ecological healing. We’ll create lullaby theatre. We’ll decide whether we want to take on a collective dreaming assignment…or if we want to adopt a dream partner for the night and see what is woven between us by dawn…or just see what awaits us in the hall of stars once we fall…asleep.

A reverie-ripe atmosphere: I see soft lighting…pillows and other sleeping software everywhere…quiet audio loops of folks sharing their Earth-friendly dreams (that will fertilize the seedbeds aka consciousness of the participants while they sleep)…art supplies and obscure objects that folks can play with and arrange to honor dreams of the past and to wink at those to come.*

I’m also inviting folks to bring artifacts from their dreams–a drawing, a rock, etc.–in order to express gratitude for these dreams and to indicate readiness for more dreamtime revelations and daytime synchronicities …and to bewilder the syntax between waking and dreaming.

What about folks who are intimidated by lucid dreaming and other tinkering under the hood of consciousness? This is the Hypnagogic Hotel; these nightly gatherings will be dreamspaces themselves, and you’re in the dream the minute you walk through the shadowed threshold. Stay up all night and you’re still dreaming.

This is a part of a larger, ongoing project of mine so I will have something already set up (blog/forum/offline happenings) so that folks can stay connected, explore more collaborative dream experiments, etc.

Biodreamediation: One dream at a time, we will re-enchant our inner ecology…and repair the outer ecology for the good of all life and perhaps tickle the Future into giving us another chance.