The Architecture of Dreams

On any regular night between the hours of 10:00 pm and 6:00 am, I live in a world of my own making. To get there, I follow a specific set of protocols developed through trial and error over a period of years that allow me to get the best possible sleep. Dreaming is an integral part of sleep as the maintenance phase of the mind, allowing us to process emotions. Dreaming, to me, is a basic human need, just as much as food, water, or shelter. The psychiatrist Carl Jung theorized that dreams are means of interpreting the unconscious mind and are, “…the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul…” ¹

When we think of architectural experience in our dreams, the blurring of spatial divisions distorts otherwise recognizable symbols of the built world. When we think further of spaces of necessity, a cave, a home, or even a bathroom in a dream can represent different emotional processes of the unconscious mind. Perhaps, more importantly, dreams provide us with an emotional connection to spaces—a connection that we might not otherwise have in the physical world. Can interpreting emotion in dream space be a meaningful way to approach a more humanized architecture? By paying attention to the way we experience space through emotion, can we approach architectural design through a uniquely human perspective, away from what is seen to something that is felt?

One of the earliest examples of shelter is the cave, where ancient humans took shelter from the elements and narrated stories of their outside world. Allison Protas writes that in dreams, caves can symbolize containment or re-entering the womb. ² In the 2023 film, La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher, we follow cave hunters in 1980’s Italy who look for ancient Greek burial tombs to pilfer their findings for money. ³ The film seamlessly blends the fractured experiences of Arthur, the film’s archeologist protagonist, by moving between Arthur’s dreams, his reality, and his hallucinations. The cave is both Arthur’s way of life and source of despair. The cave, as a symbol, gives us exactly what we need—a place for fire, for protection, and a place to share stories.

Between the years of 1909 and 1923, Carl Jung designed and built two homes on the shores of Lake Zurich. David Borkenhagen chronicles Jung’s quest to build his “dream home” writing that Jung’s homes can be understood as representations of the conscious and the unconscious mind, respectively, and that building these homes was, for Jung, an act of “existential necessity”. ⁴ In his second “unconscious” home, Jung privileged interior, experiential need over exterior, visual value with the end result appearing to neighbors as odd and “cave-like”. Dreams of a home are largely considered by Jung to be a way to delve into the self. ⁵ Like the cave, Jung’s second home became for him a source of protection from the outside world allowing him to explore the deeper more uncertain elements of his psyche. His design upends ideas of separation of space by function and explores separate spaces for states of being, raising the question of whether our priority as designers is to design for efficiency or human need.

Consider the toilet dream. In the past, I have had recurring dreams where I can’t find a toilet that is truly private (e.g., a toilet is located in the middle of a conference room) or I can’t find a bathroom at all. Junichiro Tanizaki writes at length in his book, In Praise of Shadows, about how bathrooms should feel and his frustrations with creating the perfect bathroom space with modern upgrades, writing, “…I did wonder at the time why they could not be designed with a bit more consideration for our own habits and tastes”. ⁶

Regardless of the psychoanalytic implications of stress dreams as they relate to an urgent toilet search, the last thing I would want someone to feel in a bathroom that I design is stress, nor would I want the bathroom to be difficult to find. Quiet, dimly lit bathrooms may provide respite in an otherwise chaotic workplace, subway station, or restaurant. Sometimes a bathroom is the only place you can cry in private or collect yourself without being bothered.

My experiences of public and commercial spaces of late have been akin to nightmares. Wood is considered a luxury material and is usually value engineered out of projects for something cheaper and ‘wipeable’. Restaurants in New Orleans do not take sound treatment into account when creating easily cleanable spaces, leading to noisy, chaotic dining experiences. Like the cave (or the home or the bathroom), a good spatial experience is one that provides exactly what we need in a space we want to return to—someplace calm, comfortable, and dreamy.