Exhibition Träume ... Träumen / Dreaming ... Dreams, at Schallaburg Castle and Museum, Austria, 12th April to 2nd November 2025. Artwork photos and interview with Julia Lockheart from the exhibition catalogue.

Four of Julia Lockheart's artworks, painted at our Dream Salons, are exhibited as part of the massive Träume ... Träumen / Dreaming ... Dreams exhibition www.schallaburg.at/en/2025-traeume.
​The castle and museum is an hour by car or train from Vienna. 

The exhibition catalogue below has an interview with Julia. The text is in German, English translation is underneath. 

​English translation of interview.
1. What happens at your so called “dream salons”? How did they come about?
Our dream salons are public events during which a participant’s dream is told, discussed and painted in around 90 minutes. The artworks I make are completed in this time and so are the physical outcomes of a happening, a multisensory event in which the dream is returned to visual form. We use the term “dream salon” so as to acknowledge the dream séances held by the Surrealists in the early 1920s, and as seen in Man Ray’s (1924) photograph Waking Dream Séance. Salon also refers to an informal and playful cultural and artistic gathering. 
Our process is very structured. I sit behind a table on which I paint and next to me is a projector which displays to the audience on a large screen the drawing process as it happens. Mark Blagrove sits in front of me and with the dream sharer. It is important that the dream sharer does not see the dream being painted as the images and colours used may affect the recollection of the narrative as it is told. Watching the emergent painting bonds the group and focusses attention on the dream.
The discussion process uses a six-stage technique devised by psychoanalyst Montague Ullman, and which aims to find metaphorical links between the dream and the dreamer’s recent waking life.  When the dream is first told I start to look for pages in Freud’s (1900) book Traumdeutung, on which to paint the dream. I choose pages based on the shape of paragraphs, footnotes and indentations, so as to match features of the dream, such as number of scenes, or specific objects in the dream. Although this is done quickly, without regard to words on the page, during the salon I spot words written by Freud on the page which are relevant to the dream or discussion, and I incorporate them as objets trouvés into the artwork.         
When the discussion concludes and I have finished my artwork I reveal it to the dreamer, describe its composition, including how and why I chose those particular pages, and point out the incorporated objets trouvés. When the dreamer sees the artwork it often inspires additional insights about the dream and waking life. The whole salon then discusses the painting. Afterwards I digitally scan the painting and it is enlarged and giclée printed and the text of the dream is placed under the print as the final framed artwork. This is gifted to the dreamer, so that the dreamer can revisit the dream and discussion with family and friends.    
We term our project DreamsID (Dreams Interpreted and Drawn; Dreams Illustrated and Discussed). The archive of the artworks can be seen at DreamsID.com, and many artworks, and a description of the history of the project and its relationship to surrealism can be seen in Blagrove, M. & Lockheart, J. (2023). The science and art of dreaming. Routledge.  
 
2. How does your project connect to the history of recording dreams via art?
The project returns each dream told in the salons to visual form, and hence shows the great value that I, the dreamer and the salon members place on the dream. This connects to the high value that surrealism placed on dreams, in terms of dreaming being a valued, non-rational, creative process, and in terms of the valuing of individual dreams. Surrealism highlighted the automatist and chance processes that could be seen in dreams, and also published the dreams of leading surrealists in their publication La Révolution surréaliste. Our project also connects to the Jungian practice of analysands painting their own dreams, a practice that Jung encouraged, and which resulted in the large collection of patients’ dream paintings at the CG Jung Institute in Zurich.          
 
3. Why did you choose to paint on Freud’s “Traumdeutung”?
I chose Freud’s book initially so as to honour Freud’s work on interpreting dreams and also on devising the free association method, in which the dreamer without censorship says what comes to mind when they consider each component of the dream separately. This method was used by Freud, and is used now by researchers in sleep laboratories, to find the memory sources that led to the dream being created. I knew of the method of painting onto a book, producing a palimpsest, through the work of Tom Phillips, and his altered book A Humument. I also chose the book because each page is so different. Some have footnotes, some have indented paragraphs, some have bullet pointed or numbered items, there are diagrams, and the pages have different numbers of paragraphs, and different paragraph sizes. This means I can find a page or two pages that are very appropriate to the structure of the dream. I had tried using another book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for a salon we had on nightmares, but the pages were too uniform, this is true also for Jung’s books. The Traumdeutung is also a rich source of words to highlight and incorporate into the artworks; some words are related to dreaming but many are related to emotional and family life and relationships.      
 
4. The drawings exhibited at the Schallaburg focus on dreaming during Covid19 - which insights could you gain through those on the impact of the pandemic on dreaming?
Many of the dreams we heard referred to stressful aspects of life during Covid. A nurse trying to warn partygoers about a threat from diseased nature; a doctor in tears at her attempts to find a cure for Covid; a person avoiding crowds but then glad to be dancing with others; a young man afraid to be discovered at a different house during Lockdown. But there were images also of hope, and the beauty and resilience of nature. The main insight is appreciating the very creative way in which people during sleep produce visual metaphors of their waking life emotions and circumstances. I detail this in “Painting and Socializing COVID-19 Dreams.” International Journal of Surrealism 1 no.2 (2024): 87-108.
 
5. What kind of research did you carry out connected to the dream salons and what were your findings?
The first research was connected to our initial reasons for having the slons, we wanted people to understand the connection between their dreams and their waking life, for them to appreciate the dreams they had made during the night, and to obtain some personal insight about their lives from considering their dreams. Mark had published science papers on this, using measurements of personal insight that are taken from research in clinical and counselling psychology. Although our aim was to enable dream sharers to explore their own dreams, assisted by questions and comments from the other salon members, and to further explore the dream through displaying the artwork, one salon changed this. We heard and discussed a dream of a middle-aged woman, in which her young adult daughter is going to leave home and move into a new home. The dream was so poignant that it affected us greatly. As a result, we hypothesised that an effect or even function of dreaming could occur at the time they are shared with others, because they increase empathy towards the dreamer, by helping the dreamer to disclose themselves to others. We then conducted experiments in which levels of empathy of a dream-sharer and dream-discusser towards each other were assessed, followed by the dream-sharers’ dreams being discussed, and the empathy assessments then being made again. We found that the discussion of the dream led to the discusser having significantly greater empathy towards the dreamer and towards the dreamer’s emotions and life circumstances.    
 
6. What is the significance of sharing dreams with each other?
When we share a dream with another person we often don’t know what will result! This is because although we may have created a metaphor for our waking life in the dream we might now know what waking life experiences and concerns the dream is pointing towards. It is then during the discussion that an ‘aha’ experience may occur, in which the dreamer and those discussing the dream gain insight into the life of the dreamer. Humans have evolved to have empathy towards each other, and telling stories is part of this. Stories bond people together through the process of sharing them and through their emotional and verbal content. Dreams are similar, they are created not at random but as a result of distilling the emotional concerns of our lives. The process of sharing them bonds us together, and seeing them depicted in an artwork lets us return to the dream, to the film, the fiction, that was made unconsciously during sleep. What we create unconsciously on our own, when asleep, can then inspire others as they get closer to the dreamer when the dream is shared.  The dream also inspires me as an artist, taking the spoken dream and making it visual again, while also introducing shamanic and surrealist components.      ​

​Contents pages for the catalogue are below.