What is the Dream Palace?
Dream Palace is an architecture for dreaming together: built, inhabited, and dissolved, leaving only what the dreamers carry with them. Each edition is summoned by director-founder Leslie Claire and a group of Dream Architects (or they summon her).
The process draws on dreamaturgy, developed by Daisy Campbell and Kate Alderton, which treats dreams not as symbols to interpret but as forces to tend. Where dramaturgy asks what a story needs to become itself, dreamaturgy asks the same of a dream: what does it want to be?
Each edition, summoned by a place, gathers no more than 50 dreamers at the intersection of theatre, dreaming, and collective imagination. It's made for artists, researchers, and cultural thinkers ready to step outside the pace of creation, and for anyone drawn to immersive theatre, consciousness practices, or a new kind of creative experience.
Radio show made for NTS by Cairo Residency
Dream Palace Athens
20-30 October 2023
In October 2023, Dream Palace’s Athens 10 day artistic residency culminated in a defining weekend of original performances created by residency participants that blurred ritual, technology, and sonic exploration.
The legendary IASOS performed his homecoming Swan song .
It was not only his last concert of his long and trailblazing career but a rare opportunity to hear his signature inter‑dimensional soundscapes.
Highlights included: American inventor‑musician Quintron showcased, at sunset, the Weather Warlock, an analog synthesizer and meteorological instrument.
Khan of Finland, the Berlin-based music pioneer and performance artist, gave a playful high energy performance alongside Mexican video artist Taco Urquiza.
Highlights included: American inventor‑musician Quintron showcased, at sunset, the Weather Warlock, an analog synthesizer and meteorological instrument.
Khan of Finland, the Berlin-based music pioneer and performance artist, gave a playful high energy performance alongside Mexican video artist Taco Urquiza.
Experimental Italian/French sound duo Zohastre delivered an immersive audiovisual ritual merging analog electronics with mythic storytelling
Jussi Brightmore’s Dreamshare, a participatory dream recall installation inviting collective memory-making and subconscious exchange
Keynote talks were given by experts in the field such as Theatre Director Daisy Iris Campbell and Writer & Researcher Katrin Vallis deepened the experience, alongside daily guidance from members of the Oneironotics Department.
Jussi Brightmore’s Dreamshare, a participatory dream recall installation inviting collective memory-making and subconscious exchange
Keynote talks were given by experts in the field such as Theatre Director Daisy Iris Campbell and Writer & Researcher Katrin Vallis deepened the experience, alongside daily guidance from members of the Oneironotics Department.
Dream Palace Cairo
29 December – 14 January 2024
Dream Palace’s Cairo residency was the next chapter following Athens. It offered one- and two-week programs of radical dreamwork and symbolic immersion.
Core elements included a showing of work in progress at the art centre Darb1718, designed to charge and share our collective dream research. Collaborating artists also developed a radio performance for NTS Radio born out of the residency.
Participants engaged in dream-sharing circles and communal dreaming practices with returning residents such as Evan Root, Daisy Campbell & Jussi Brightmore.
Participants engaged in dream-sharing circles and communal dreaming practices with returning residents such as Evan Root, Daisy Campbell & Jussi Brightmore.
As well as inviting new residents such as Irish/Egyptian artist and creative director Kamelia Mckayed & Iraqi/British writer Wassim Alsindi. The Cairo Residency deepened our understanding of the architecture of Dream Palace with a concentrated residency in another site of significant cultural memory, Dreaming with the land and connecting through deep listening, local culture, and intention.
Dream Palace: Cadaqués
May 2026
“One day it will have to be officially admitted
— Salvador Dalí
“One day it will have to be officially admitted
that what we have christened reality is an even
greater illusion than the world of dreams.”
— Salvador Dalí🐟🚲
🐟🚲
Dream Palace Cadaques was a week-long surrealist theatrical game, inviting you to step into the dream, on Isla S'Aranella, just off the coast of Cadaqués in Catalonia. You could participate for the whole week or just a few days, helping create a collective, unscripted Exquisite Corpse performance through all your chance interactions with our Architects, a varied group of crazy dreamers and highly experienced dramaturges guiding you through deep play, ceremony, performance, awareness, sound, and vision.
Dream Palace Cadaqués built toward one collective Exquisite Corpse performance on the 30th of May, 2026, the whole residency folding dream by dream, scene by scene, toward that single unscripted night.
Inspired by the Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative method born from the Surrealists in which each contributor adds to a work without seeing what came before, passing it on blind, the devising process was structured so that every scene of the final work was blind to the others, with an innovative writing process creating the seams between each part of the play. The result was something no single mind could have planned or predict.
Dream Palace Cadaqués built toward one collective Exquisite Corpse performance on the 30th of May, 2026, the whole residency folding dream by dream, scene by scene, toward that single unscripted night.
Inspired by the Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative method born from the Surrealists in which each contributor adds to a work without seeing what came before, passing it on blind, the devising process was structured so that every scene of the final work was blind to the others, with an innovative writing process creating the seams between each part of the play. The result was something no single mind could have planned or predict.
Chance on Trial
At the end of his life, Dalí convened philosophers and scientists at his Theatre-Museum to debate chance versus determinism. This event was called Proceso al Azar (Chance on Trial). He watched remotely, as he was unwell and nearing the end of his life. He would later be buried there, unknown to him at the time, in that same theatre, beneath an unmarked stone, trampled daily by tourists.
As a nod to this event, to Dalí's presence in Cadaqués, and to our conviction that Cadaqués is the true birthplace of Surrealism, a place artists once made pilgrimage to in order to learn from a local woman, Lydia de Cadaqués, Dream Palace Cadaqués surrenders its shape to chance. Each day, an artistic altar to chance was created, used to guide each participant's movement through the devising process, drawn by lottery into sessions, scenes, and dreaming processes led by our Architects and Residents.
𓆚 ¿Es esto un sueño? 𓂀 És això un somni? 𓂀 Is this a dream? 𓂀 ¿Es esto un sueño? 𓂀 ¿Es esto un sueño? 𓂀 És això un somni? 𓂀 Is this a dream?
