Have you ever thought that your dreams could be harvested and used in an exhibition? If your answer is no, then guess again. The Museum of London started a new project titled “Guardians of Sleep,” with the intention to better understand mental health.

Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any more bizarre, now artists, museums, and researchers want to harvest your dreams. In collaboration with Canada’s Museum of Dreams, which is a literal hub for studying the social and political significance of dreams, “Guardians of Sleep,” is an effort to get even deeper insight into what happens in our brains when we’re asleep. 

The aim is to gather participants’ dreams (particularly people who have lived in London during the Coronavirus pandemic), as part of the museum’s “Collecting COVID” initiative. This is in hopes of providing more information about how our subconscious can create dreamy scenarios in times of extreme crisis. Altogether, this will be used to better understand mental health.

Sharon Sliwinski, the Museum of Dreams’ creator, took inspiration for this project from Freud’s description of dreams, hence why it’s called “Guardians of Sleep.” In a statement, she shares: “Here dreaming is understood to be a symbolic process that helps us work through the struggles we face in our waking lives. This new research with the Museum of London aims to provide a rich resource for further understanding the significance of dream-life as a mechanism for working through social conflict and how the pandemic has affected the human condition.”

The “Guardians of Sleep” research project will be launching at The Museum of London in February 2021, and is currently recruiting participants. For those interested, email [email protected] by January 15, 2021, to get involved. The selected participants will get to discuss their dreams with scholars who specialize in psychosocial research.