Sleeping and Dreaming

For the first time since completing our supplement on its beginnings, I returned to Wellcome Collection yesterday to see the preview of their second major exhibition, Sleeping & Dreaming, which opened today.

The topic is a fascinating one, in part because it rests on some of the most central physiological questions humanity has yet to answer: why do we sleep, why do we dream, and what do sleep and dreams signify? Faithful to its eclectic mission, Wellcome Collection doesn't try to present any answers or firm conclusions. Instead, these topics are explored via five thematic sections that combine science and art to sometimes startling effect: "dead tired" (on sleep deprivation); "world without sleep" (on artificial light and technology); "elusive sleep" (on insomnia and those unable to sleep well or securely); "dream worlds" (on the challenges dreams pose to our rational understanding of the world); and "traces of sleep" (on those ideas linked to sleep in mythology and popular culture).

The setting is at once serene and unnerving: a bichromatic collection of spotlit narrow slabs racked against a dark background, designed by the German architect Nikolaus Hirsch. Strolling around was itself a dream-like experience, with exhibits drifting into and out of view between the pale panels and side-chambers. Among other delights, there's an opportunity to watch all of Dali and Brunel's seminal 1929 film Un chien Andalou—our senior editor, an Andalou ingénu, was wincing beside me within moments at its most famously grotesque moment—as well as to view art by Goya and to listen to an interview with a victim of sleep-deprivation interrogation. As you'd expect from Wellcome, there is also detailed information on the science of sleep and dreaming, with graphs of brain-activity during the different phases of sleep and examples of data fed live from sensors on a sleeping body.

The exhibition runs until the 9th March 2008, with a full programme of events alongside it; it is—like the collection itself—free to the general public.