Review of the exhibition Lucid Dreams, held at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, from December 2024 to October 2025

Abstract

From December 2024 to October 2025, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem presented Lucid Dreams, an interdisciplinary exhibition marking the centenary of Surrealism and of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Curated by Adina Kamien, the exhibition brought together some 180 works and objects, including Surrealist and contemporary art, dream- and sleep-related multicultural, religious and historical material culture, and digital experiential installations. Surrealist books and documents were shown alongside artworks by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Remedios Varo, and others, illustrating the close relationship between Surrealism and dreaming. One section of the exhibition was devoted to the dream told to Freud by his patient the ‘Wolf Man’, Sergei Pankejeff, and another to Jacob’s biblical dream of a ladder and angels ascending to heaven. Ranging from ancient Egyptian headrests to a virtual-reality experience developed for the exhibition, Lucid Dreams crossed geographical and chronological boundaries to investigate dreams in art, material culture, and new media. Illuminated Muslim texts and Jewish manuscripts, Japanese New Year prints, Chinese and Italian dream/landscape stones, and works in a wide range of media demonstrated the enduring human impulse to visualize, interpret, tell and understand dreams. The exhibition has a lavishly illustrated and scholarly catalogue, which includes Yoram Inspector’s essay on the Wolf Man dream, which reconsiders Freud’s interpretation of the dream, and an essay by Peretz Lavie on the neuroscience of dreaming.