Dream of ceramic artist Abigail Schama, one of the artists in the Freud Museum exhibition Women and Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists.  

We have bought a quite ordinary house in the Somerset countryside to move into. It has an unremarkable garden with three outhouses in it. Two of them are empty greenhouses, at right angles to each other, the third is wooden and painted pink. I thought I could use the garden for raku firing but see that the greenhouses are in the way. At the back of the garden there is a public pathway with a further lawn beyond it which we had agreed to buy. I don't know what we bought it for, or what to do with it, as it is as unremarkable as the garden. On the lawn a wolf is sitting. Behind the lawn there is a grand National Trust property and a beach. At the beach someone has found a treasure chest while beachcombing or mudlarking with old papers inside, personal items, maybe letters, and I start reading them. I am excited to find out about someone from the past who has written them. But a young woman with a black bob and yellow coat says that they are hers, which is disappointing to me as I had wanted to delve into a stranger’s old possessions. In the next door house there are bohemian neighbours, one of them is a long-haired man; they play music and I wish I could join them but they are oblivious to me. I know that the previous owner of our new house made mediocre pottery and I think that she's trying to copy me, even though she is not interested in my work. I also know that I am having to clear out my old house. I am then given a lift to the local town which is next to the lawn. It is a charming, bustling, medieval market town with cobblestone streets. I'm sitting on the high wall of a bridge. My guide jumps down and I want to follow her but it is perilously high. I then slide down and onto some wooden rubbish bins which break my fall. There are two schoolgirls in brown uniforms with capes and berets; maybe it is their end of term. I go into a large haberdashery shop that has banks of sewing machines. There are two women working there who are eating cheese sandwiches. I ask them to teach me how to use a sewing machine because it would be a good way to meet other creative people. But they say they do not teach sewing and they scoff and say ‘not’.

Details of this Freud Museum Dream Salon are here.  The Salon was held during the museum's Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists exhibition, which Abigail Schama is part of. In the discussion we explored with Abigail how the dream may be related to her being at the museum and to being part of the exhibition. This included reference to the old house, to the wolf (paintings of the dream of the Freud's patient the Wolf Man are on the first floor landing of the museum), to old personal papers (many are on show in the museum and exhibition) and to interactions with creative people.   

The event was funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, as part of the UK Festival of Social Science 2024. 

I am on what looks like the New York subway system, but it’s cleaner and above ground and goes to suburban places. The train is silver and dark blue. It’s sunny. I am in a hurry to get to a presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I overshoot my stop and have to walk back to where I was supposed to meet a friend of mine who is going to come to the debate with me. When I get to where we're supposed to meet my friend isn’t there, and so I'm waiting for her. Other people are milling around, outside the large building. The building is old, like from the 1930s, red brick, with hard limestone around the square door. I feel a sense of anxiety, waiting for her and feeling the need to go inside, being pulled in two directions. But then I see three women that I went to high school with and end up in a conversation with them and catching up. They have black shirts and I have a black jacket and white trousers. I was friends with one of the women when I was very young, but she was more like an acquaintance when we were in high school, and she was quite conservative. Eventually they peer-pressure me to go inside the debate with them but without my friend, who I'm still waiting for.

The dream was told shortly before the 2024 US Presidential election. The Dream Salon was part of the Surrealisms Paris 2024 conference, held by the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and hosted by the American University of Paris. The conference was a commemoration for the centenary of the founding of Surrealism. Details of the conference are here.

An accelerated 7-minute video of the dream being painted is on the DreamsID YouTube channel here.   

I am outside a building which is as an amalgamation of places and buildings that I know. I go inside through a pointed-arch door, the door has a cold, round, brass handle on the left-hand side. The door is made of old wood with three decorative vertical panels. Inside there is a white corridor and a door. I want to it but, although there is no-one around, I hear a voice which says ‘you don’t want to go in there’. There is then a group of people around, like on a tour, and one of the group says ‘I am scared’ and is not able to go into the room, and again I am told ‘you don’t want to go in there.’ I go further down the white corridor and there is a wooden door which leads onto a room like a broom cupboard. A hand opens it but a person says to me ‘you don’t want to see it.’  I then go down the hall, there are now no people around and I see a small door to a crawl space. I open it and listen and call ‘hello’ to see if anyone is there. No-one answers. I crawl along and the space is not straight. I go up, over, down, it is a windy maze. There is then an old room, like a library but without books, it has wooden walls and a long oak table. The table has a red fabric runner along the middle of it, with tassels on the side. The library is dimly lit, no-one has been there for years, but it is not dusty. As I am about to explore it I am yanked to another part of the house. I am screaming with frustration and anger that I cannot get into the rooms, which are all locked. They have beautiful doors, arched and old, which makes me want to go into them. There is no answer as to why I can’t go in. In the end I find a narrow corridor, which gets me away from the people who are stopping me going through the doors.

This dream was told as part of the Minotaur Ballet Surreal Swansea exhibition of contemporary Surrealist artworks and performances, 8th - 26th October 2024, held to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of Surrealism.