From Friday July 3rd to Sunday 5th at Gallery James on Briesestr. 19.

I always know the summer crescendo has reached its peak when the streets of Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood get filled with orange-pink flags, and art hoppers swarm around, looking for the many hidden and blatant experiences offered during this inclusive and eclectic annual art extravaganza, unfolding over 48 memorable hours.

Our cozy corner for dreamers will take shape, likely as one of the “hidden” experiences of the Festival, in a quiet side street between Schillerkiez and Richardplatz, at the lovely and homey courtyard Gallery hosted by Jonathan James in the up-and-coming Rollbergkiez.

Come dream with us, enjoy a meditative break and chill with a cool glass of lemonade with wild herbs and flowers.

Your hosts,
Lenara Verle & Gallery James.

“The dream is the moment when we converse with and listen to our inner reasons, our wise ones, who do not wander within this reality. It is a moment of knowledge that exists outside the time we inhabit.” - Ailton Krenak

“Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. We have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.” - David Graeber

When people ask me what I do, I inform them I’m a researcher.

I am now in the beginning of my research of dreams as a technology. Before that I was researching money as a technology. At the time, alternative economy called me loudly and yanked me from my previous research topic, media art and collaboration. It seemed crazy and dangerous to leave my familiar research career behind and enter the strange and completely new to me topic of money. When I told friends I was doing this, they mostly thought it was a dubious and reckless choice. I agreed, but for me it was never a choice, I just had to do it. It was difficult but also exciting and rewarding in countless ways, and I’m very grateful and pleased after all.

These days I find myself more at ease in this inbetween, receptive state when the whole focus of my career and my attention is performing a shift. I’m spending a lot of time reading authors I’ve never heard of, while also discovering that beloved and familiar authors have written beautifully about dreams and imagination and radical hope.

In my research into imagined futures, it has been easy to find visions of dystopia, or projections and assessments based on what one would call realism. I’m finding it much harder to locate the positive visions. Utopia is almost a taboo word nowadays. But that’s exactly the kind of future that I’m most interested in.

If we want to effect positive change in the world, the first step is to be able to imagine, to dream of a bright future, the best possible future. A life infused with love and awe, with relationships that are nurturing.

As I write this, I picture some readers frowning and rolling eyes, but I also suspect quite a few doing the opposite.

When utopia is taboo, and hope is labeled as radical and naive, I find myself again searching for the rebels. In my previous research topic I tracked the rebel economists, brilliant minds often shunned by the classical economic institutions. During the years I followed them, quite a few ended up leaving the institutions completely to become independent researchers, a path I myself also chose, realizing I didn’t want to comply with what seemed like pointless extraction of my attention and intellectual work. This is of course not just a feature of academia, it’s pervasive and turns out it’s actually part of the subject of my research.

In a society where our attention is being extracted as a finite resource, our minds and our imagination have been restricted by what the movies, the news, and social media choose to show us as realities and possibilities.

Sleep is often framed as unproductive time, dreams as part of an inconsequential and time-wasting moment in our lives.

The wisdom of Indigenous peoples tells us dreams have a role in creating reality. I agree, and dive into a wealth of knowledge that was once dismissed. It resonates also in a personal way. I am not only a prolific dreamer but I come from an Indigenous lineage.

Growing up I had little contact with my paternal grandmother, who lived many miles away. Yet I’m the one of the five siblings who physically resembles her the most. She was Indigenous, likely Kaingang, and married into a German immigrant lineage. I myself have emigrated the opposite route, from Brazil to Germany. My grandfather still spoke a German dialect. They gave Indigenous names to their children, though, as a second name, which in Brazil is often the real name. The first name chosen just to fulfil a promise to the church, or to a godparent. My grandfather died before I was born, but I found letters he wrote to my father addressing him by the second name. At some point my father got a prestigious position that came with a brass name plaque on his office door, and he asked for the plaque to be redone, omitting his second name. I’m not sure of his motivation, but we saved the rejected plaque.

Now I feel like I’m browsing through discarded debris, memories half remembered, half imagined. I research dreams and how they are similar to imagination, tapping into a place in our consciousness that’s less controlled, less restricted by our rational mind.

I am exploring what my previous self would consider the fringes of weirdness, because that’s where I’m finding the most fertile dreams and imagination. Realism feels awfully shortsighted.

The most positive and wonderfully detailed vision of the future I found is from an 80-year-old lady who receives messages from angels. She describes a Golden Age with chapters covering everything from education to health, from travel to law and politics. The part about money and work seemed to touch a point my imagination had already reached. After all, I had spent the past decade diving into alternative economy theories. But other areas made clear to me how limited my vision of the best possible future had been so far. The amount of abundance and joy that she wove into her descriptions of daily life was completely new to me, and yet felt like a natural birthright for all beings.

It’s so delightful and refreshing to read her writings. It has pushed the boundaries of my imagination, and inspires me to think of what kind of intermediate actions could now pave the way for that golden road. I can feel practical steps naturally emerging, instead of finding myself constricted by boundaries dictated by a need for practicality.

I’m inspired and feel happy, as I haven’t felt in several years. Yet, it took me quite some time to start writing about it.

Coming out of the closet a while ago as the crazy plant lady was very easy. It’s trendy to touch grass. I volunteer at a permaculture project outside of town. I give workshops teaching people how to recycle old newspapers into origami paper pots for their seedlings.

Now I hesitate before the possibility of becoming the crazy angel lady. I don’t even consult my friends because my inner critic is already telling me it’s dubious and reckless.

It might be easier though than I fear. The backlash I dread might not be as harsh, or maybe I just won’t bother. I’m now an older, wiser lady. My role models include Ursula Le Guin and Baba Yaga.

The angels have not yet spoken to me personally, at least in a way I have recognized already, but I’m open.

References and further reading:

Hope in Common - David Graeber
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/hope-in-common/

Receiving Dreams - Ailton Krenak, interviewed by Alipio Freire and Eugênio Bucci
https://teoriaedebate.org.br/1989/07/06/ailton-krenak-receber-sonhos/

Shared Dreams - Ailton Krenak, compiled by Aparecida Vilaça
https://quatrocincoum.com.br/resenhas/amazonia/sonhos-partilhados/

The Golden Future: What to Expect and How to Reach the Fifth Dimension - Diana Cooper - Hay House UK, 2023

The Future Human: New Ways of Living and Being on Earth - Lee Harris and Regina Meredith - New World Library, 2025

Dreamscaping Territories - Audio Experience
https://dreamscaping.ju.mp/

The Spirit of Hope - Byung-Chul Han - Polity, 2024

Tapestry Thinking for Flourishing Futures - Nova Institute https://novainstituteforhealth.org/tapestry-thinking-for-flourishing-futures/

O desejo dos outros: Uma etnografia dos sonhos yanomami - Hanna Limulja, Davi Kopenawa. - Ubu Editora, 2019

A dance festival open to experimentation, a long time art collaborator, a space for emerging practices. All of these together nurtured the creation of my new art research piece - Dreamscaping Territories. It shaped itself as an audio - a special track crafted with synergistic elements to support the power of imagination. It contains an inspiring voice script, and more importantly, a gentle binaural melody to facilitate a propitious consciousness state.

After all, I met Marlon Barrios Solano at the Science of Consciousness conference several years ago, and since then we have been cross-pollinating each other’s practices in the field of art & technology. This time, Marlon invited me to join a group residency in Dortmund, Germany, to explore the juxtaposition of AI technologies, performances, and discussions within a space where speculative futures, ancestral knowledge, and emerging technologies converge: The Tectonics of Otherness.

Beyond Gravity Festival proposed to us the theme “Decolonizing the Digital”, and my piece is an invitation to decolonize our imagination. In a world where our attention is extracted and our realities are curated by media, dreaming becomes a radical practice. Indigenous wisdom reminds us: dreams help create reality.

We mostly don’t realize how our minds and our imagination have been restricted by what the movies, the news, and social media choose to show us as realities and futures. The realm of possibilities we access in our heads has been slowly colonized, as we go about navigating the busy contemporary daily life.

Sleep is often framed as unproductive time, and dreams as part of an inconsequential and time-wasting moment. The wisdom of Indigenous peoples tells us a very different story. Dreams have a role in creating reality. Our dream practices are powerful.

This audio piece invites us to dreamscape a unified land of thriving, unique and interconnected beings. Our dream is then witnessed and launched into the collective consciousness to resonate with the wider worlds, our future selves and descendants.

We held Dreamscaping sessions for small groups during the festival, laying on beanie bags, wearing headphones, with eye masks and essential oils for those who wanted. After each session, we did a round of sharing, starting with one short phrase or image drawn on a post it note by each person in the group. Common threads were found, and as a fun experience, made visible on a map we created on the wall during the event.

Somebody asked me if the map we created was the result. And no, it was just a way to continue the process, a little like letting out a bit of steam from a dish we’re cooking, or in this case letting out some artefacts from people’s minds. What is then the result? It is whatever opened inside each participant. Our minds are something personal, unique and private, but they also take part in a resonant dance with other minds - with a more collective consciousness.

Towards the end of the audio experience we are gently reminded: “You are connected to all the other unique, wonderful people going through this experience. At this moment in time, and also in the sessions that will happen in the future, and the ones that happened in the past. You recognise each other as dreamers, fellow weavers of imagined territories.”

To ensure many sessions can happen in the future, an online version is now available for anyone to join the dreamscape. There are four audio tracks to choose from. They have very minor differences, and any of them will provide you with the whole experience. Choose according to your inspiration of the moment. Here’s the link:

After your dreamscaping you’re welcome to share with us any part of your experience by sending audio notes to the project’s dedicated phone number. You can record your audio in any language you wish. Contributions might be quoted on our site, after being transcribed and translated, but we won’t publish your phone number or other personal details.

We hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

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