Lucid Dreams, Exhibition View. Curator: Adina Kamien. Associate curator: Sarah Benshushan. Designer: Shirly Yahalomi, Nathan Cummings Building for Modern and Contemporary Art. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

In the eternal city of cultural and sacred convergence, the multiplicity of history presses against the present. Amid this density, it is easy to overlook Jerusalem’s stature as a hub of world-class museums, chief among them the Israel Museum. To miss a visit—an error under any circumstances—would be a particular omission now, when it is home to Lucid Dreams.  The exhibition, on view until October 18, 2025, is an open portal into the realm of the free mind, which the Surrealists claimed as their own and named le merveilleux.

Set in the heart of the city, amid stone and sky, the exhibition draws on oneiric logic, where boundaries soften between waking and sleep, and history brushes against myth. Dreaming is viewed as the tacit, lesser companion of wakefulness, yet it casts a profound intellectual and emotional shadow over our daily existence.  Tacit, that is, unless one is an artist. “Artists,” as Adina Kamien, the exhibition curator, puts it, “are like dreamers who are awake. Art, much like dreams, allows us to experiment with creativity and explore the psyche.”

André Breton, Dream Object, 1935. Assemblage: cardboard, photographs, mirror, synthetic fur. 41.5×43.7×4.8 cm. The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealism in the Israel Museum. ( Courtesy: Israel Museum).

Walking into Lucid Dreams, one steps into a liminal space: a temporal corridor, curated by Adina Kamien in the blueprint of Andre Breton’s 1935 Dream Object (Reve Objet). The idea of ‘l’objet à fonctionnement symbolique’  is a concept that Breton introduced in the December 1935 issue of Minotaure —a symbolically functioning object, a simulacrum of an everyday item, that carries the uncanny resonance of the unconscious: the material manifestation of dreams and chance. It is also a physical assemblage created by Breton himself. Made from cardboard, photographs, a mirror, and synthetic fur, it greets visitors at the exhibition’s forefront. Conjured in the spirit of Breton’s Dream Object, the corridor becomes a dreamscape—an emotional terrain rather than a linear gallery. Like dreams themselves, its logic is spatial rather than narrative. Carl Jung envisioned the dreams as a series of rooms or recesses; in Lucid Dreams, Adina Kamien translates that psychic architecture into curatorial space—an architecture of intuition.

Sharon Balaban, Mascara, 2024. 4K video installation, 4:54 min. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

The show resists chronology. Instead, there is a curatorial orchestration—a rhythm, a pulse—that guides the viewer through. I am using the word ‘orchestration’ advisedly.  Adina Kamien, the head of the Modern Art department at the museum, the daughter of a musicologist and a founder of the Hebrew University orchestra, composed this dreamscape of a show, layering it with the influence of Surrealism (which, along with Dada, is Dr. Kamien’s academic field of expertise) and her background in clinical psychology. In the Surrealist tradition, dreams were often rendered as pure unconscious discharge. But Adina Kamien reframes this. She is more interested in lucid dreaming—a liminal state where one is both aware and immersed, simultaneously subject and author. That threshold serves as a metaphor not only for artistic creation but for curating itself. “You are like the conductor of an orchestra,” I remarked in our conversation. She smiled: “Yes. But you’re conducting silence and space.”

Dr. Adina Kamien has long moved between the roles of academic and exhibition-maker. Her doctoral research centered on Arturo Schwarz, the Italian-Egyptian art dealer and theorist whose postwar re-interpretation of Surrealism emphasized spiritual transformation and rebellion. Those same values animate Lucid Dreams. “This show is about a kind of freedom,” Kamien told me. “The freedom to listen to instinct, to move through space emotionally rather than rationally.”

Lucid Dreams, Exhibition View. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

The exhibition spans 18 sections and features over 180 works that encompass centuries and cultures. The visitor drifts through a landscape of associations: animal-headed figures, womb-like chambers, flickering videos, talismanic objects. The museum describes it as presenting “a wealth of art and artifacts dealing with the realm of dreams — from ancient times to contemporary art,” combining objects from archaeology, ethnography, Islamic and Asian art, modern and contemporary works, and illuminated manuscripts.

Dr. Kamien explains: “I wanted the show to feel like a dream, where you move through an interior logic.”  This dream logic gives rise to uncanny proximities. In a pairing that alludes to Jungian archetypes, Michal Naaman’s The Dream of the Wolfman with Two penguin/Nun Jokes—a reference to Freud’s most enigmatic patient—shares a wall with archaic Laconian and ancient Greek goddess figurines, their gestures frozen in mystery. In another room, a centuries-old Egyptian headrest hovers between object and metaphor, serving as a sculptural threshold between consciousness and sleep.

Michal Naaman, Follow the Dotted Line, 1991. Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm; The Dream of the Wolf-Man with Two Penguin/Nun Jokes, 1990. Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

Indeed, for all its connection to the ephemeral, the exhibition is acutely grounded in the material world. In part, it reflects the curator’s interest in amalgamating art and material culture, and in part, it is a reflection on our elusive ambition to elucidate dreams. From bronze sculptures and talismans to virtual reality installations, the exhibition pulses with what Gaston Bachelard once called the “material imagination” — the idea that the texture of reality is itself a vessel for reverie. Dr. Kamien is attuned to the physicality of dreaming. “The Egyptian headrests were used to literally hold the dreaming head,” she notes. “They are portals, bridges between body, ancestors, and cosmos.”

Some of the most evocative objects are also the humblest: a ceramic pillow, a Chinese dream stone, headrests that once supported a dreaming body. “These,” as the accompanying text tells us, “are not only items associated with sleep, but were also believed to hold metaphysical properties—carriers of the unconscious”.

Lucid Dreams,  from left to right: Headrest, Egypt, Late Old Kingdom, 6th Dynasty, 24th-22nd century BCE; Alabaster. Rectangular pillow decorated with two figures on horseback. Impressed cartouche of the Zhang Family China, late 13th century, Yuan dynasty. Painted stoneware. On the right: Janaina Tschape, Dreamsequence, I &II, 2002. DVD, 4:45 min. loop. ( Courtesy of Israel Museum).

What Dr. Kamien calls “the visual and material intelligence of the objects” guides the associative leaps from one work to another. She shared with me that one of the methods guiding her curatorial choices was shidduch (שידוך) or shidduchim (שידוכים). The shidduch system is a structured method for individuals to find suitable marriage partners through introductions, typically facilitated by a third party known as a shadchan (matchmaker). An age-old tradition of mitzvah, attained through helping others, shidduchim can be viewed as a ritualized form of fate and choice: matches are made not simply based on surface-level traits, but on deep compatibilities—often invisible until revealed through careful observation, context, and spiritual insight. Likewise, in curatorial practice, especially one as layered as this one, the act of placing seemingly unrelated artworks side by side becomes an act of interpretive matchmaking.

From left to right: Giorgio de Chirico, The Poetical Dreamer, ca 1937. Oil on canvas, 36.5 x 27.8 cm; Mordecai Moreh, The Caste of Dreams, 1964-66. Oil and tempera on canvas; Dorothea Tanning, Home Light, 1952. Oil on canvas; Kay Sage, The Upper Side of the Sky, 1944. Oil on canvas. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

The result—like a successful match—is not grounded in similarity, but in productive tension, or perhaps, in mirrored absences. Just as a matchmaker intuits latent affinities between two individuals from vastly different worlds, the curator draws out submerged resonances between disparate artworks, introducing them to one another across time, media, and sensibility. These ‘curatorial shidduchim’ or ‘dream pairings’ unfold throughout the exhibition: Giorgio de Chirico’s solitary Poetic Dreamer is paired with Castle of Dreams, Mordecai Moreh’s animated architectural landscape; medieval dream-interpretation manuscripts—including Pitron Halomot, composed in Babylonia in the 9th or 10th century and Kitab Ibarat al-Ru’ya, the earliest known Islamic dream manual compiled by Ibn Qutayyah—are exhibited beside a 17th-century Japanese silk painting (The Meeting of Honen and Zendo in a Dream, artist unknown) and Andreas Serrano’s The Interpretation of Dreams (The Other Christ).

Sometimes, the productive tension resides within a single artist’s oeuvre—such as that of Arab-Israeli artist Karam Natour, whose digital drawings evoke the illuminated quality of ancient manuscripts while unfolding as graphic dream-journals in fantastical, serialized form.

Karam Natour, from left to right: Walking in My Sleep, 2021;  Dreams in Daytime, 2015; Time Travel, 2015; Afterall, 2015; Afterall II, 2015; Channeling, 2015. Digital Drawings. (Courtesy: Israeli Museum).

The exhibition asks not “what does this mean?” but “how does this resonate?”—a question that echoes through the catalog as well, a work of art in its own right. Essays by artists and scholars of art history, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, religion, and technology, such as Yair Zakovich, Peretz Lavie, Lior Zalmanson, Adina Kamien, Ruth Netzer, Haim Finkelstein, and Susan Hiller,  extend the dreamscape into language, texture, and theory.

Exhibition view of Dina Goldstein’s In My Dreams, 2022. Papercut installation; The Dreaming Room, 2024.Papercut installation: mixed media including furniture and sound. (Courtesy: Israel Museum). 

Throughout Lucid Dreams, the notion of the double — uncanny, fractured, or prophetic —haunts the viewer. Raida Adon’s video Woman Without a Home presents a dreamer who is her own double, caught between belonging and exile. The effect is immersive and disorienting. One does not so much look at the art as inhabit its atmosphere.

Raida Adon, Woman without a Home, 2014. Video, 27:25 min. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

But Dr. Kamien resists easy binaries. The show gathers artists—Israeli, Arab-Israeli, Druze, Palestinian, and international—into a space where surrealism and psychoanalysis meet something older and more numinous: the dream as a ritual, omen, or invocation. The works draw from Jewish, Islamic, African, Buddhist, and many other traditions, each holding its own cosmology of the unseen. She points to the figure of Jacob dreaming of the ladder, or Joseph decoding Pharaoh’s vision. In a lucid dream, a dreamer possesses an interpretive awareness of dreaming; in prophecy, one wakes into responsibility. “I want people to leave the show feeling that dreams are not escapes,” Kamien insists. “They are demands. They display something about your present.”

Tal Shochat, Untitled, 2025. Chromogenic print, 124.5 x 124.5 cm. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

This present is deeply fraught. The October 7^th heinous attack on Israel, followed by the drawn-out and devastating war in Gaza, the atmosphere of precarity and grief, permeates the show in subtle ways. Adina Kamien rarely makes this explicit, but speaks of the exhibition as a “place of breath” — a psychic sanctuary in a time of contraction. Lucid Dreams becomes an act of cultural resistance: a refusal to reduce human experience to a polemic or panic. When asked whether the current climate influenced her decisions, Dr. Kamien is measured—but admits that the urgency of the present shaped her process. “Curating,” she says, “is a form of care.”

The show, which marks 100 years of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, was initially conceived as global in scope. But after October 7, many international loans were withdrawn. Future international collaborations were also affected. Rather than diminish the show, this gave it “a more internal gaze,” Dr. Kamien noted. “It became more reflective of Israeli society’s collective inner world.”

Toward the end, we encounter Goya’s melancholic sleeper—an image that distills the exhibition’s inquiry into the fraught terrain of the dream state. Here, the dreamer is not liberated but appears haunted by creatures of his own psyche. That this image, centuries old, still exerts such force on our imagination speaks to the unresolved tension it captures: the simultaneous potential and peril of relinquishing reason. Like many works throughout the exhibition, it suggests that creativity, like dreaming, begins not in certainty but in surrender—in stepping beyond cognition, into the fertile darkness where forms emerge before they are named.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, From left to right: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters/Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe, America, 2008. C-print, mounted on aluminum. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

In this final moment, the curatorial arc feels complete: having traversed rooms of sacred symbols, surreal figures, and artistic meditations on Cartesian duality (the thinking self vs. the physical self), the viewer is ready to cross into a virtual world—one shaped by spatial disorientation, somniloquism, and shifting consciousness that resist narrative anchoring—a final surrender to the dream itself.

“If,” as Mary Ann Caws noted in the foreword to her 2004 book, Surrealism, “Breton considers the surreal as a dialog with the other (with what is encountered by way of dreams, coincidences, correspondences, the marvelous, the uncanny; a reciprocal exchange, connecting conscious and unconscious thought), then so shall we.”

Exhibition view, from left to right: Samah Shihadi, Lying Down, 2020. Charcoal on paper, 140 x 200 cm; Tal Shochat, Untitled, 2005. Color print, 126 X 180 cm, Yehudit Sasportas, The Moon Film, 2013. (Courtesy: Israel Museum).

The exhibition may be based in Jerusalem, but its appeal is borderless. It invites us to think with our instincts and feel with our intellect. Suspended between mysticism and modernity, between the personal and the collective, the exhibition gathers embers of the unconscious and reframes them not as escape, but as speculative ritual. Like a dream, it resists closure. But it leaves behind a charge—that art can offer us not only respite, but new patterns of attention, new architectures of becoming.

Lucid Dreams, like lucid dreaming, holds open the space between sensation and interpretation, between instinct and inquiry. Its clarity is not didactic but illuminated from within. Or as Adina Kamien puts it: “Dreams do not obey conventional logic. They open a space for imagining, processing, and transforming.” The exhibition invites its viewers to inhabit a space of slippage—that liminal zone, between clarity and chaos, where dreams originate and creativity begins.