Rain dreamt up.
  • Rain dreamt up.
On Saturday night in a newly renovated but not-yet-inhabited condo building in South Lake Union, 22 people tried to build a sculpture together. So what if the medium of the sculpture was dreams? It was an experiment; it was Seattle artist Susan Robb's Sleeper Cell Training Camp (which I wrote about before it happened, here)—and it did not start well.

When the artist arrived at the building that morning, the sponsored food, drink, and expensive audio equipment rented by City Arts Festival for the event had been stolen. There was a rumor that the event would be canceled. "They can steal my audio equipment," Robb said that afternoon, "but they can't steal my dreams." Nice.

Sound art, a video about mirror neurons narrated by someone with a weird voice wearing a burka in a flickering landscape, the ingestion of vitamin B and 18-year-old whisky, the laying of heads on pillows stuffed with hops, lavender, and mugwort—these things were all part of the event. When people arrived, they told the story of the last dream they could remember on video. Before they went to sleep, everyone agreed to try to dream, in some way, about mist.

You remember Sunday morning's monsoon, right?

The next dreamspace by Robb will be created at Open Satellite sometime in early 2011 (she's pushing it back from the earlier plan of December to avoid holiday conflicts).