About
This project presents a photographic documentation of a Lucid Dreaming Study at Swansea University, along with photographs representing the participants’ lucid dreams.
Lucid dreaming is a natural sleep phenomenon in which the dreaming person realizes that they are dreaming, whilst remaining in the dream. They are fully conscious just like you are now, only they know everything they are experiencing is a dream. Like all conscious experiences, lucid dreams can vary in intensity. Some lucid dreams can feel as ‘real’ as waking reality, sometimes more real, and yet sometimes less.
The Lucid Dreaming Study looked at combining pre-sleep cognitive training with REM-sleep stimulation, to induce participants into a lucid dream. Conducted at Swansea University Sleep Lab, participants underwent a brief 20-minute training period whilst lying in bed. Each participant then took a nap and, when they entered into REM sleep, the experimenters played audio and visual cues - flashing lights and beeping sounds - in the bedroom where the participant slept. The hope was that these cues would enter the participant's dreams and signal to the dreamer that they were dreaming – like a signal from the external world shouting "hey - this is a dream!"
I (Guy Wilkinson, photographer) interviewed the successful participants about their lucid dreams as soon as they had finished the study. I then spent just over a year re-imagining their lucid dreams into photographs. Whilst researching online ways to go about recreating these dreams as photographs, I saw that several real-life events were happening which represented some of the participants’ dreams perfectly. I attended and photographed these events as a means to represent the participants' dreams in a very real and documentary way.
This sequence of events inspired me to progress with the project in a way that kept all the photographs representing the participants’ lucid dreams as real and meaningful as possible, as it paid respect to the term synchronicity. Defining that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related, the term was first introduced by the historical psychologist Carl Jung, who was and still is today a highly respected figure in the world of dreaming psychology.
All the photographs in this exhibition that represent the participants’ lucid dreams are real on one level or another, and hold a level of synchronicity to either the participants’ dream directly, or to me as the photographer personally.
Some of the lucid dreams experienced by participants during the study were naturally represented by events that occurred after the sleep study. I attended these events and photographed them as direct representations of those specific lucid dreams. However, for dreams that did not have corresponding naturally occurring events, I created scenarios to represent them, aiming to maintain as much realism and authenticity as possible in relation to the original dreams.
To achieve this, I ensured the curated events closely mirrored reality and also incorporated elements that were meaningful to me. I observed that the lucid dreams with naturally occurring events appeared synchronistic, fostering a meaningful connection between the event and the corresponding dream. By infusing my personal meaning into the curated events, I aimed to extend this sense of significance across the photographs depicting lucid dreams without naturally occurring events to represent them.
I believe this introduces a new aspect of dreaming to the project too, one even more elusive than lucid dreaming: shared dream experiences. This concept involves events in a dream being shared and experienced communally by multiple people who are also asleep and dreaming, as if it was a communal dream. However, in this project, it seems to extend to people in different states of reality and time — participants experiencing a lucid dream during the sleep study and me recreating these dreams in real life at a later time.
For example, one of the participants dreamed of standing in an empty plane. I then took a photograph inside an empty plane to represent this lucid dream. As straightforward as this may sound, it exemplifies how someone’s lucid dream experience can be shared by another person in their waking reality— in this case, mine.
There were more synchronistic examples of this involving the participants' lucid dreams that aligned perfectly with events occurring after the study. For example, one participant had a lucid dream about attending a football match he was planning to visit in real life. I attended this match and captured it live, directly representing his lucid dream in the exhibition. Similarly, another participant dreamed about being at an anti-gun demonstration. While preparing for the exhibition, I learned of an upcoming anti-gun protest in London. I attended and photographed this protest, using the image to accurately depict the participant's lucid dream in the exhibition.
This project showcases a blend of connections between the participants' lucid dreams and the real-life events I photographed to represent them, with some connections occurring naturally and others carefully curated by me. My approach to depicting the participants' lucid dreams with realism and depth was inspired by witnessing real-life events that perfectly mirrored these dreams. This led me to infuse each representation with a sense of realism, seizing the opportunity to visually showcase through photography how dreams and waking experiences can intricately intertwine.
The first part of the exhibition presents participants getting ready for the study.
The second part of the exhibition presents portraits of the participants during the study, alongside photographs representing their lucid dreams.
All the photographs documenting the study are digital and all the photographs representing the lucid dreams are film and hand printed - minus one, ‘The Void’, which due to technical reasons is digital.
Fundraising
Personally, I (Guy Wilkinson) have found lucid dreaming to be very profound and transcendent, so I set this project up to be a non-profit fundraiser for the Dream Science Foundation.
The Dream Science Foundation funded the Swansea University Lucid Dream Study that this project covers.
All funds raised during the exhibition at the bar for beverages and post cards were donated to the Dream Science Foundation, helping them to fund future studies on sleep and dreams.
A total of just over £200 was raised and donated. Thank you to all who made a purchase during the exhibition.
The Exhibition for this project was open to the public from August the 8th, till August the 18th and was hosted at the Undercroft Art Gallery in Norwich, UK.
Special thanks
Tasha Wellstead
Charlie Morley
Robert Wagonner
Michelle Carr
Karen Konkoly
Mark Blagrove
Liz Marie Bray
Mark Tapscott
Mercedes Hood
Claire Furness and family
Kalliopi Pappadimitriou
Zana Clare Josephine Wise
Saxon Digital
Dyad creative
Obscurer darkroom
Norwich Air Museum
Rainbow Wholefoods Store