The Telepathy Project: Dreaming the Collection

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The Telepathy Project consists of Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples who created the work Dreaming the Collection using artworks from the National Gallery of Victoria. The artwork consisted of two parts. It was a selection of paintings and prints from the NGV Collection that featured images of people sleeping, with performances made of characters in the artworks. A postcard was also provided that invited viewers to record their dreams and send it back so that the these dreams could also be performed. The postcard showed Kent and Peoples asleep on the floor of the NGV’s Federation Square venue below the installation of paintings and prints they selected. On one night, from 7pm until 7am, the performers, dressed as characters of the paintings and prints, read out allowed the notes about dreams on the back of the returned postcards. The work was based on the idea that when we dream we access an unconscious experience that can be shared telepathically with others. It is significant those who participate in recording their dreams are asked to put the postcard under their pillow before sleeping and then recording their dreams, as Kent follows the suggestion of telepathy in the ideas of the Greek philosopher Democritus. Democritus believed that dream images can be telepathically shared via physical means and that images composed as atoms could enter the body through pores and Peoples believes that they were able to enter into the dreams of participants via the postcard image of themselves asleep.