By Anya Ventura

How MIT alumni created an experimental installation at the MIT Museum to turn our innermost worlds into collective experiences

Hotel #2: Communal Dreams is composed of three handcrafted aluminum cylinders, each one equipped with a narrow black mattress, that converge at one bright central dome. “You slide into the tube, it feels like you’re a cosmonaut getting loaded into a rocket ship,” says dream scientist Adam Haar SM ‘19, PhD ‘22. Three mobile red lights, suspended on metal pendulums, swing above, trailing light and sound in calculated arcs. Each time the light swings overhead, the sleeper hears a noise emitting from inside the incandescent bulb, and feels its passing heat.

The installation is now on view as part of the MIT Museum’s exhibition Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, part of a year-long focus on the theme of time. It is designed to bring sleepers together, molding a common dream through the gentle interventions of sound, motion, and light. These sensory cues are designed to infiltrate the mind during the lightest stage of sleep—the brief porous phase between wakefulness and deeper sleep when dreaming begins.

The sculptural environment is the latest in a series of “dream hotels,” a collaboration between Media Lab alum Haar, MIT Museum Studio Director and CAVS alum Seth Riskin SM ’89, and former CAST Visiting Artist Carsten Höller. Drawing upon MIT’s groundbreaking research in dream engineering, the idea for these experimental prototypes is to create what Haar calls “an amusement park for the unconscious,” probing the permeable boundary between waking and dream, while extending the research lab into the public space of the museum.