Dream Palace is a week-long surrealist theatrical game, looking for you to step into the dream, on Isla S'Aranella, just off the coast of Cadaques in Catalonia - the only place Dali ever said he felt like home. You can participate for the whole week or 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 dreamaturgues guiding you through deep play, ceremony, performance, awareness, sound and vision.

Dream Palace: Cadaqués is for artists, researchers, dreamers  and cultural thinkers ready to step outside the pace of creation and explore the forces shaping what comes next.  Dream Palace is for  anyone drawn to immersive theatre, consciousness practices, or simply the possibility of a new kind of creative experience.

Dalí said Cadaqués was the only place that ever felt like home. Long before he became Dalí, this remote coastal town on the Costa Brava shaped him, especially through a local legend, Lídia de Cadaqués. It is said that Lorca and Buñuel were equally fascinated by her. Dalí himself described Lídia as possessing “the most magnificient paranoic brain, apart from my own, that I have ever come across” a woman deeply rooted in the rocks of the magical Cap de Creus.

Though we are not here to celebrate Dalí, we will be journeying to the source that shaped him. As it turns out, there is an ancient Asklepion ruin nearby, a Greek healing sanctuary where pilgrims once received cures through dreaming, built with a theatre attached. That this antecedent to our own dream palace exists here, in a lineage that began in Athens, feels like one of many signs that Cadaqués is calling.

Dream Palace is an architecture for dreaming together, a space built, inhabited, and dissolved, leaving only what the dreamers carry with them. To create each dream palace, director-founder Leslie Claire summons a group of Dream Architects (or they summon her). For the process that unfurls within the Dream Palace, Leslie draws inspiration from dreamaturgy, a strategy developed by Daisy Campbell and Kate Alderton, collaborators of the Dream Palace, a way of working with dreams not as symbols to be interpreted, but as living forces to be tended. Where dramaturgy asks what a story needs to become itself, dreamaturgy asks the same of a dream: what does it want to be? What happens when we let go of the need to interpret our dreams and allow the dream to keep on dreaming?