Dream Craft is a tentacular inquiry into living and reclaimed dream practices as transformative knowledge-making in these times of collective soul loss and wetiko. Initiated by Erika Sprey, it explores how a thriving ecology of dream practices across different ancestral and contemporary lineages can subvert colonial epistemologies and catalyze a shift in consciousness in the face of polycrisis.
With art, in its broadest understanding, as its nexus, Dream Craft flows from a concern for how dreaming can be conducive to respectful relationships with other persons while being rooted in the recognition that all entities, material and immaterial alike, possess potential personhood within an ecology of selves, and therefore also know how to dream.
This artistic research is a continuation of Erika Sprey's two previous curatorial projects, Wxtch Craft (2020-2022) and Earth Craft (2022-2023), that resulted in, among many things, 29 recorded conversations and five internationally distributed zines. Dream Craft completes the Craft Trilogy which aims to challenge Eurocentric colonial onto-epistemologies, while drawing attention to rejected knowledges that have suffered and still are in danger of epistemicide, such as certain forms of witchcraft, ancestral soil care and dreaming within and for the collective.
For more on dream activism and public offerings - the so-called Dreambody Activations - scroll bellow!
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Dream Craft is set up as an associative, labyrinthine research platform that can serve as humus for emerging artistic trajectories and pluriversal connections. This last March, the first cohort of the dream school, Antonio Monroy, Laura Burns, Laura Valencia and Erika Sprey, began weaving a network of kindred dreamers, a Dreamfield Alliance, or una Alianza de Sueño y Territorios, to support, help protect and celebrate oneiric lineages and practices that emerge from the land/territory. Through sharing knowledge, resources, and solidarity across cosmopolitical divergence, aiming to strengthen oneiric forms of collective soul and soil care para que la vida siga in deep time.
The alliance consists of an open assembly of dreamweavers - expertos ritualistas, abre caminos, mediadores entre mundos y co-criadores - who work at the intersection of art, critical anthropology, ancestral constellation work, (dream)body work, and situated healing practices. Its main vehicles are regular dreamfield-led online gatherings and a yearly Dream School ∞ Encuentro Onírico in Mexico and beyond, conceived as a mutual, cosmopolitical exchange between the participants, the peoples, and (im)material beings rooted in specific territories and dreamfields.
Crianza mutua serves as la alianza's prime method - the slow dreaming and crafting reciprocal relationships with our human and more-than-human collaborators, while honoring existing oneiric lineages and extending our cosmopolitical capacities.
For more info on our first pilot edition of the Dream School / Encuentros Oníricos subscribe to the Dream Craft Substack and receive reflections, reports, news and future open calls!
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Dream Craft offers:
– Dreambody activations that metabolize a specific topic - a ‘god’ or a matter of care - that is haunting the dreamfield, while making use of the unique capacities of oneiric time-space. These activations can consist of collective reading sessions, writing workshops, animated body work sessions, wa(l)king dream and deep listening scores and podcasts, often co-designed with other artists and practitioners with relevant embodied knowledges.
– These activations can be sided by the use of oneirogens - dream-inducing herbs - if the situation calls for a specific plant collaborator, who must also be willing to enter into a dialogue - una crianza mutua. This acompañamiento aims to be integrative and culturally sensitive, as part of a decolonial approach to indigenous (dream) plant medicine and situated healing practices.
Opening the 2023 Gerrit Rietveld Studium Generale programme, the Collective Dreamweavers conference at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum offered the first constellation of artist-led dreambody activations. See here for more info!
Dream Craft is also a growing library and sound and image archive of dream crafts and lineages world wide. It is possible to invite a curated section in a mobile, traveling installation that carries the name of, and is to be hatched like the cosmic egg.
Do you want to stay informed about events and other news?
Keep an eye on the Dream Craft Instagram account, which in shapeshifted ways continues the work of Wxtch and Earth Craft.
For daily research notes and occasional blogs, please check the Dream Craft’s page on Substack.
If you wish to receive the newsletter in your mailbox, please subscribe to the Newsletter option on Substack
For oneiric love notes and other inquiries, please write to: erikasprey@gmail.com.
Dream Craft is generously supported by Mondriaan Foundationa and Amarte Fonds.
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On dream activism
In many cosmogonies across the world, dreams are revered as the sacred interfaces between humans and more-than-human beings, los seres de la alteridad that can take on the shape of, for instance, a shapeshifting nahual, old earth spirits (las antiguas), a hungry rainbow spirit or volcano deities holding the water of the universe in their depths. In perspectivist, multinaturalist Amerindian cultures, dreams are vessels through which one can - and even must - gather insight on the point of view of often all too powerful more-than-human entity that can capture one’s soul and even life if one neglects one’s ritual duties, thus breaking the intentional and mutual bond. Night dreams and dream-like states - what anthropology calls el conjunto onírico - serve as oracular portals, offering diagnostic and remedy, premonition and protection, and are therefore indispensable for the wellbeing of the community. In such ontologies, paying attention to dreams is not an eccentric past-time or selfcare tool in one’s wellness routine — it is a matter of life and death. To ignore the messages from the invisible spirit realm is to risk becoming soul-blind, disoriented, and sick.
Today, in most Western knowledge systems—rooted in separation and individualism rather than interconnection and communality - dreams have been stripped of their mythical and mystical significance in favour of modern ‘psychological’ or neural-networked ’physiological’ interpretative frameworks. We have trouble remembering their messages, let alone understanding them; our listening has become shallow and the self-proclaimed ‘seers’ of these times are dangerous self-serving traders in ideological fantasy. Living under the grind of late capitalism, our dreamspace is clogged by an unrelenting attention economy that floods our bodyminds with stress hormones, endless distractions, commodified desires and exhaustion. Dreams are solitary, private affairs with little social or political impact beyond activating metaphor (“i have a dream…”) or brain optimization for a productive daytime consciousness…
As the Nap Ministry Tricia Hersey reminds us, as one of the few within the Western world, a captured dreamscape severs one's ties to the invisible world and denies access to ancestral guidance - the source of all long-term resilience. Not paying attention to our dreams and cherishing our dream lineages contributes to a slow and invisible epistemicide, that is, the systematic erasure of vital tools to establish a living relation and communication with parallel more-than-human worlds. When this communication becomes too disruptive and dangerous to the status quo, the powers to be that must render these ‘visions’ subjective, meaningless, irrational, or—if nothing else—coopted (i.e. exoticised and twisted) for capitalist ends. Dreaming, on its own terms, always was and will remain an act of resistance against the odds.
Drawing deep lessons from, among other pre-Christian, rejected dream traditions and multinaturalist dream lineages, Dream Craft explores what it takes to remember and reclaim dreaming as a legitimate and vital form of knowledge-making for our times. The dreamfield not only possesses its own ontological reality but also emerges as a generative space—a source of knowledge and power otherwise inaccessible through ordinary human cognition. Herein lies the potential of recognizing dreams as ontological events in their own right: liminal moments where different worlds can interact and affect one another, potentially enabling forms of transversal shamanism and cosmopolitical diplomacy.
Can we liberate dreams from the confinements of mere biological function, representation or metaphor? How can dreams, recognized as a distinct ontological modality, not only become pathways for communicating with more-than-human entities, but informants for more grounded and integrated political decision making and action in times of crisis? What can these ontological dreams reveal about what is fermenting - and what needs to be faced - on personal, communal and even planetary level, underneath the homogenising single-narrative of colonial-capitalist epistemologies?
Moreover, is it possible to remember and reclaim these ancestral dream modalities within a Western context, and what forms of attunement, skill and attitude does crafting our dreams require? In other words, can our bodyminds, despite being so permeated by colony and capital, still be touched by the numinous in what is perhaps one of our last inner temples - a place where we still experience the invisible, the ineffable and inexplicable on a nightly basis? How can we as a society give these immaterial oneiric lineages and heritages the weight and place they deserve? And ultimately, how do all these considerations fold back into how we make, define and decolonize ‘contemporary’ arts that may also be yet another iteration of an enduring, ancestral ongoingness?
These are some preliminary questions that will continue to shapeshift as this project dreams its way, dancing through the forest, porque la ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
