Dreams have always been a powerful source of inspiration in art and culture. Many of history’s great artist and thinkers have questioned how our nighttime imaginings can offer a glimpse into our inner lives, or a doorway into alternate realities. Surrealism, a movement at its height between 1924 and 1945, was influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud and built upon the belief that creativity came from deep within a person’s subconscious. Figures like Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí painted from within a dreamworld, creating works that transcended the literal world. Meanwhile, Man Ray wrote: “In the morning when I wake up, if I have a dream, I draw it right away. Many of the drawings in *Free hands *are dream drawings.” Self-taught artist Antonia Luxem follows in this long-standing tradition. Their multidisciplinary work spans film, installation, painting and writing, exploring different realities and transporting viewers to new mental spaces. Their moving-image piece, *On Falling, *was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2024. The meditative odyssey plays with the Greek myth of Sisyphus from the perspective of a lesbian falling through a dark sky. The project was the start of an ongoing experimentation into how the structure of dreams might look. Now, Luxem returns to the film with a follow-up project that deepens this investigation. A Manual on Falling and Dreamingconsiders the hypnagogic state – the threshold between wakefulness and sleep – to explore both the physical sensation of falling and a metaphorical disorientation that can open new ways of seeing the world. In conversation with Aesthetica, Luxem reflects on this new work and the need to embrace dreams as a way to more fully engage with our reality.

**A: Much of your work focuses on your own dreams. Why do you choose to explore this theme? **

AL: Dreams are an incredible fertile ground to explore how other realities could look and feel. I’ve been fascinated by my own dreams since I was a child and I know how much there is to learn from them. They’re about processing memories, making sense of our lives and finding connections between unrelated experiences. Dreams are forces that move us beyond ourselves, they take us outside the confines of our body, life and opinions. Making art for me is a way of processing and understanding myself and the world. In that way, creating and dreaming are engaged in similar processes. For instance, in dreams we’re both the viewer and the environment, so the way we feel will influence our surroundings, and the way the landscape takes shape impacts us. The same is true in waking life, but most of the time we’re not in touch with that anymore. It’s incredibly gratifying jumping intentionally and consciously between realities, because you start to find all these new hacks for life that are borrowed from dreams – you can create magic. I’m currently writing another, more detailed text about this titled *How to draw a map of the universe or walkabout on a Sunday. *I’m interested in the power we can gain from being able to shift perceptions. We might not be able to change the world, but we can control the frame through which we view it.

A: How do you balance narrative and abstraction in building your dream worlds?

AL: I want to communicate a whole universe through my work. It’s more than a story or concept, it’s much closer to music. I learn a lot from music, because a song can never be fully understood and explained, it will always remain open and has the power to change the way you experience the day. That’s the kind of art I’m interested in making. I use metaphysical and phenomenological questions as starting points, and then I go on a journey and just see where it takes me. We can learn from dreams, or even daydreaming or during conversations, that narratives are far more open than one is made to believe. We should widen our horizons of perception and telling stories. We often catch ourselves saying things like “I had a dream that didn’t make sense” or “it was absurd”, because they don’t fit into the logic of a narrative that we’d expect when awake, but they’re still stories. They might not comply with usual structures but make sense in another dimension. When we bring them into this reality, they sort of collapse into abstraction.

A: Could you explain what hypnagogia is, and how this state informs your practice?

AL: Hypnagogia is a transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep. It’s when you start getting drowsy. It’s very short-lived. I try to stay as lucid as possible during this phase, because you get to experience unusual sensations in a heightened way. It can sometimes be frightening as you feel an intense shift in your body, you lose yourself, some people have said it’s close to the sensation of dying. A very common experience is the feeling of falling, which is both a literal physical experience and a gateway to altered perceptions of time, mind and reality. You’re between spaces. When you physically fall, time can slow down, almost as though half a second extends into a minute and everything seems to stop. I see this pause in time as a revolutionary moment. The physical act of falling therefore becomes a way to experience time differently – slowed and expanded – and as a metaphor for transition, loss of control and transformation.

A: A Manual on Falling and Dreaming is a continuation of your earlier film On Falling. Why did you decide to build upon this project?

AL: Sometimes we’re so focused on seeing one thing or being in one place and we forget to step back, zoom out and see the wider image. When you do, you might want to explore some other “islands”, but you need to figure out how to get there. It’s something like snakes and ladders. I’m a tour guide who can take you between these different spaces. On Falling is one of the many “islands” that forms part of a larger universe that I’ve been building over many years. A Manual on Falling and Dreaming is one of the ladders that I’ve made as part of this. It’ll take you to most islands, even those that don’t yet exist. On Falling began as an experiment to understand dream structures and how those might form a new creative and perceptual framework for making films in the future. After conducting an experiment, you need time to look back at the results and reflect on the outcome. A Manual on Falling and Dreaming explores this journey and realises that falling reveals a fusion between physical and conceptual worlds, where time can be hacked and our experience of self and surroundings are transformed. It becomes a gateway to the structure of my next film, which will seek to appropriate dream structures in order to re-create a unique metaphysical experience. My interest lies in creating new forms of filmmaking and ways of watching.

A: You speak of ambiguity as an “endangered resource. How do you nurture this in your process?

AL: Ambiguity isn’t vague, it’s precise and intentional. My work emphasises the importance of uncertainty – as a spiritual, metaphysical resource depleted in modern life – and dreams as vehicles to recover it, allowing for empathy, multiple perspectives and a shift in how we relate to reality and time. By observing and embodying dream structures we can cultivate a deeper, longer-term vision for life and open creative possibilities and new ways of being in the world – and thereby also create new worlds.

A: What**’**s next? Anything we can look forward to?

AL: I’ve been building a Dream Incubation Chamber, a sensorial and touring space built with collaborators by hacking into and appropriating dreams structurally, phenomenologically and in the way they represent time. Through it, I’m trying to facilitate people traveling to unexplored spaces within themselves. It’s a place of radical attention, possibilities and healing. I’m also writing my next film, CHIMERAS, that will take place within a variant of this chamber. It’s a darkly comedic exploration of consciousness, that’ll take you on a journey that collapses into absurdity. A hacker god summons a group to dream parliament, a surreal chamber where sleep cycles dictate the rhythm of their debate. As they drift through NREM and REM-like states, their interactions grow increasingly disjointed and their world destabilises into near-collapse.

Words: Emma Jacob & Antonia Luxem

Image Credits:

All images courtesy of Antonia Luxem.

Posted on 14 October 2025