Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams imagines sleep as a shared field
At the MIT Museum, Carsten Höller reframes one of the last territories we tend to consider entirely private with Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, an installation not to look at, but to enter, lie down inside a sculptural environment, and drift into sleep together with other visitors. Developed with cognitive scientist Adam Haar Horowitz and visual artist Seth Riskin, the work, presented within the exhibition Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, on view until August 16th, 2026, positions dreaming as a shared field, unsettling the assumption that the mind belongs only to itself.
Speaking with designboom, the Belgian artist reflects on the dream as an already existing apparatus of disorientation, what he describes as ‘the most powerful architect.’ Unlike the engineered perceptual shifts of his earlier works, here control recedes almost entirely. ‘The dream is the confusion machine I didn’t have to build,’ he tells us, a space where perception slips beyond authorship. Within Communal Dreams, influence operates as a subtle signal rather than a directive force, allowing the unconscious to absorb, distort, and recompose it into something that can never be fully shared, yet is no longer entirely one’s own.
Hotel Room #2 by Carsten Höller, Adam Haar & Seth Riskin © Anna Olivella
Carsten Höller removes the ground from under perception
Carsten Höller has long constructed situations that destabilize perception, from slides to inverted vision devices, yet here he turns toward a state that already exceeds any engineered disorientation. As he tells us, the dream is a space where the brain ‘generates a complete hallucinatory environment that the sleeper believes entirely.’ What earlier works simulate through physical means, sleep performs with radical efficiency, suspending control, dissolving certainty, and replacing the external world with an internally constructed reality that feels no less convincing.
Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams builds on research into targeted dream incubation, a technique that introduces sensory cues at precise moments of sleep onset. Light pulses, fragments of sound, and spoken prompts are carefully timed, yet the results resist any simple notion of authorship. ‘Engineering implies total control,’ the artist notes, ‘and the dream resists control in a way I find very beautiful.’ Even when a shared suggestion takes hold, producing overlapping dream motifs, what takes place within each mind remains unstable, branching into narratives that cannot be predicted or contained.
an immersive installation that blurs the boundary between exhibition space and sleeping environment
The museum as a site of unconscious attention
In this context, the museum itself is subtly inverted. Rather than asking visitors to remain upright, alert, and socially attentive, Communal Dreams invites them to withdraw from visibility altogether. Höller recalls the intensity of encountering a Rothko Chapel alone, contrasting it with the performative attention of crowded exhibitions. Here, that performative layer collapses as participants close their eyes and become the work. The gallery shifts from a space of observation to one of internal immersion, where perception continues without the need to be seen.
The most disquieting proposition of the work lies in its collective dimension. Three sleepers receive the same cues, and in some cases report strikingly similar dream fragments, tunnels, movement, flashes of red light. The installation does not claim proof of shared dreaming, but instead produces a condition where certainty begins to erode. As Höller suggests, the unsettling aspect is not that dreams might be collective, but that we can no longer be sure they are not.
developed with dream scientist Adam Haar and artist Seth Riskin
Dreams as an architecture without limits
Throughout his practice, Höller has approached space as something that can be reprogrammed to alter perception, yet dreams extend this idea beyond material constraints. Referencing early perceptual experiments by American psychologist George Stratton, he describes the brain as an active constructor of reality, capable of building entire environments from memory and emotion alone. In this sense, Communal Dreams can be perceived as an invitation, a minimal framework through which the dreaming mind can disclose its own spatial and narrative possibilities.
The installation does not control imagination, but operates through suggestion, introducing what Höller describes as seeds. These cues do not determine outcomes but initiate processes that evolve unpredictably within each sleeper. The broader implication extends beyond the exhibition, raising questions about how emerging technologies might influence the unconscious in the future. For now, Höller situates this exploration within art, a space where experience can be proposed without being instrumentalized, allowing participants to encounter the unstable, generative terrain of their own perception without fully mastering it. Discover more in our full interview with Carsten Höller below.
the project invites visitors not just to observe, but to enter a controlled state of sleep inside a sculptural setting
interview with Carsten Höller
designboom (DB): Your work often creates situations where perception is destabilized, and participants lose their usual sense of control. Dreams already exist in that territory. What made you interested in bringing the unconscious itself into your artistic practice?
Carsten Höller (CH): I have always been interested in what happens when you remove the ground from under somebody. With the slides, with the upside-down goggles, with the rotating beds — these are all devices that interrupt the usual way you process the world. But then you realize: every night, the brain already does something far more radical than momentary interruption. It shuts down voluntary movement, paralyzes the body, and generates a complete hallucinatory environment that the sleeper believes entirely. There is no doubt in a dream, though perception is unstable, control is gone. I borrow from Roger Caillois in describing the vertigo of my slides as ‘a voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.’ Sleep is the version where lucidity itself is taken away. That interests me enormously. The dream is the confusion machine I didn’t have to build.
conceived as both artwork and live experiment
DB: Communal Dreams suggests that dream content can be influenced through designed sensory cues. At what point does this shift from observing dreams to actively engineering them?
CH: It doesn’t, really. Engineering implies total control, and the dream resists control in a way I find very beautiful. Adam Haar and I use a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation — light, sound, spoken words delivered at specific moments of sleep onset. In Dream Hotel Room #1: Dreaming of Flying With Flying Fly Agarics, we suggested flying with fly agarics. Sixty-seven percent of sleepers reported flying dreams. We published this result in an American Psychological Association journal – as far as we can tell, this is the first paper of its kind producing real and serious science from data collected within an art exhibition like this. But still, this is not total control – what they flew over, what they felt, whether they were afraid or ecstatic — completely unpredictable. I spent years studying insect communication, where you send a volatile signal and get a behavioral response. Dreams are not like this. You send a signal, and the unconscious does what it wants with it. That’s why I find this more interesting than the control of stimulus input and behavioral output.
Carsten Höller, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, 2024, installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel © Carsten Höller. Photo: Mark Niederman, courtesy Fondation Beyeler
DB: The project is developed with researchers studying dream incubation, a technique that attempts to guide the themes people experience while sleeping. What did collaborating with scientists change in the way you think about dreams as an artistic medium?
CH: When I was a scientist, subjective experience was forbidden as data. You could study an insect’s olfactory response, but your own perception of the experiment was irrelevant. When I started making art, I wanted to bring back precisely what had been forbidden — the first-person. Not only my first person, but subjective experience in general. Now, working with Adam and the MIT researchers on Dream Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, I find myself in an interesting position: collaborating with scientists who have found rigorous methods for studying the subjective. They can detect sleep onset from brainwaves, know when a dream is just beginning, intervene at the right microsecond, and then ask: what did you experience? The dream report becomes data. It changes both what art is andwhat science is willing to engage with.
the installation hosts three participants at a time within a shared sleeping structure
DB: Dreams are typically considered the most private of experiences, yet this installation invites strangers to sleep together and potentially share dream themes. What fascinates you about the idea of collective dreaming?
CH: With Rosemarie Trockel, I built House for Pigs and People at the documenta X in 1997 where humans watched pigs. The audience thought they were observing the animals. But of course the real question was: who is the animal and who is the observer? Communal Dreams have a similar inversion. You think this universe of sleep is private, the mind is entirely your own, even when sleeping with strangers. But the truly unsettling thing is that when three people receive the same sensory cue and three of them dream of being in a tunnel, on a train, red lights flashing as they pass by — you don’t know whether that’s neurology or something else. I’m dissatisfied with the givenness of what we accept as individual experience. The installation doesn’t prove that dreaming is collective. It produces the conditions under which you can no longer be certain it isn’t.
pulses of light, ambient sound, and subtle movement are calibrated to influence dream states in real time
DB: Many of your works operate like experiments where the outcome is uncertain and participants become part of the process. Do you think of this installation as an artwork, a scientific experiment, or something else?
CH: The real material I work with is people’s experience — and in the case of Communal Dreams, people’s experience is people’s dreams. Dreams are collected, transcribed, studied. Some will appear in a peer-reviewed paper. Some, a person will carry with them for years. Peer-reviewed and personally powerful. I would like both things to be true at once, because I think the separation between them was always artificial.
drawing on research from the MIT Media Lab and Harvard
DB: The installation turns the museum into a place where visitors are asked to sleep. How does this inversion challenge the role of the museum as a site of conscious attention?
CH: My first overwhelming experience in a museum was at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I was alone. The paintings did something to my perception that I could not explain, and I didn’t want to explain it. When I saw a Rothko exhibition years later in a packed room at the Tate, with everyone performing their attention, the effect was not the same. I have always disliked the idea that the museum asks you to be a conscious, upright, attentive viewer. There is a social norm present in the way we are meant to interact with the artwork. The most interesting perceptual states — doubt, vertigo, hypnagogia, to name a few — happen when that uprightness, those norms, they collapse. In Communal Dreams, the visitors lie down, close their eyes, and become the work. In the space of a dream there is no uprightness. The work in Communal Dreams is made in the unstable in between, somewhere in between the physical sculpture and the viewer’s mind, in between the viewers and each other, in the moment of being taken to another world by something as simple as a passing red light. The museum doesn’t lose its purpose. It becomes a place for experience with purely internal attention and no rules, only stimuli.
the work frames sleep as a porous, collective experience
DB: Throughout your practice you often construct environments that alter states of mind. Do you see dreams as another kind of architecture, one that exists entirely inside the brain?
CH: George Stratton, in the 1890s, wore inverting lenses for four days until his brain flipped the world back. That experiment fascinated me because it proved that perception is a construction — the brain builds the world it expects, and by taking hold of expectation we can invert the whole world. My upside-down goggles, my moving hotel rooms, these are architectural proposals to that constructing and expecting brain. Dreams are a step beyond, to the brain constructing without expectation. Only memory, only emotion, only the residue of the day, only possibility. And it builds entire cities, entire strangers with their own motivations. That architecture is more expansive than anything we can fabricate in steel or glass. Spaces built by, not for, dreams. And so Communal Dreams is metal and glass built as an invitation to the most powerful architect, the architect of dreams.
external stimuli and the presence of others infiltrate the subconscious
DB: If technologies for influencing dreams continue to develop, they could eventually be used beyond artistic contexts. Do you see this work as opening a speculative conversation about the future ethics of shaping human imagination?
CH: This is not speculative. Gordon Wasson, amongst others, documented cultures where the content of dreams was a communal resource, shaped by ritual, by mushrooms, by shared intention. The idea that dreams are untouched private territory is historically very recent and probably false — information, media, screens already shape what the mind does when it drifts. The question is not whether dreams will be influenced but by whom and for what purpose. I prefer to raise this inside an art context because an artwork proposes an experience – it doesn’t harvest it, at least not commercially. But of course we are very uncomfortable in our culture with the unpredictable, and dreams are one of the last unpredictable things. I would be very unhappy to see them domesticated. This work and the larger Dream Hotel project with Adam uses science to plant a seed in the unconscious – a seed of movement, a seed of flight – but as anyone with a garden knows, a seed is not an instrument of control. A seed is a way to make something in collaboration with an existing substrate, a way to get to know the soil. Incubating a dream is much the same. The Dream Hotel offers seeds, visitors come and plant them (a sound, a sight, a smell) in their unconscious, and by doing so they become aware of the substrate of their self. Without purposeful tools to interact with this part of our perception – the unconscious – we simply must take it as given.
the installation builds on recent studies suggesting that dreams can be guided and even partially synchronized
dream sequences begin to overlap, producing fragments of a shared narrative
the project extends Höller’s long-standing interest in altered perception
transforming sleep into a medium where authorship disperses across multiple bodies and minds
project info:
name: Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams
artist: Carsten Höller | @carsten.holler
collaborators: Adam Haar Horowitz, Seth Riskin | @sethriskin
location: MIT Museum
exhibition: Lighten Up! On Biology And Time
dates: October 28th, 2025 – August 16th, 2026
curators: Anna Wirz-justice, Marilyne Andersen, Sarah Kenderdine, Giulia Bini
institution: MIT Museum in collaboration with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
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