About Us
The Society for Effective Dreaming (artists Alder Philipps and Elissa Blake), with the support of the City of Urbana Arts & Culture Grant, seeks to collect a sampling of the Urbana community’s dreamlife, document the dream-topology of our local landscape, and capture a slice of the wider socio-political moment in which we are embedded. Inspired by Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams (in which dreams collected from Beradt’s friends and community members offer an astonishing record of the effects of totalitarianism on a society’s dreamlife), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (in which the protagonist’s “effective” dreams affect the course of reality), and by our own voluminous dreamlives, we aim to amplify collective dreamlife, affirm the imagery of inner resistance, and create communal space in which to metabolize the emotional turbulence of the moment into lucid, effective change.
Share your dreams and dream-art with us through our online submission form, or locate one of our dream-sharing boxes (locations TBD) to record and submit your dreams by hand!
Where to Find Us
Find us at the Urbana Night Market and Champaign-Urbana Winter Farmers Market on select dates between September 2026 and February 2027, where we will be hosting walk-in dream-sharing circles and distributing fliers promoting our main event, free dream journals, and other materials furthering our second broad purpose: to urge one another to reclaim rest and rhythmicity. In locating our sharing circles at the market, we aim to draw a diverse audience and assert that sleep/(dreams) and human-to-human conversation are as necessary to human flourishing as fruits and vegetables. We offer a vision of a culture that honors and supports natural cycles of darkness, sleep, and dreaming as central to who we are as human beings and members of a community. We seek to build consensus around the value of sleep and dreaming and the reality that rest is resistance, offering concrete suggestions for cultivating a widespread sleep/(dream) ethic in public spaces and workplaces.
Our walk-in dream-sharing circles will culminate in a main event hosted at the Independent Media Center in March 2027, where we will present a selection of our own dreams and dream-inspired art in a gallery show. Alder will create art collaged from photographs of the local landscape, reflecting on the way the mind recycles waking imagery into new and strange configurations; Elissa will explore mood/color and language play in the form of abstract cross-stitched “dream-catchers” framing dream text. We aim to draw attention to the process of translating dreamlife into waking expression (whether linguistic, visual, embodied, sonic, or otherwise) as a practice in exercising creative power. We embrace dreamlife as the most accessible manifestation and source of creativity, and reject the notion that art is some specialized activity available only to those with time and talent.
The event will feature an opportunity for participants to narrate their dreams, accompanied by an immersive soundscape in collaboration with local musicians. We will also provide tea and snacks, cozy space strewn with pillows and blankets, and diverse supplies for participants to create their own dream-inspired art to contribute to our compilation. We ultimately seek to enliven the community not merely by sharing our own creative gifts, but by gifting every person access to the taproot of their own creative life. Finally, following our main event, we will compile and arrange a selection of participants’ dreams and dream art into a booklet, to be freely distributed around the community and made accessible on our website. Contributors may also choose to submit original copies of dreams and dream art to be preserved in a time capsule, buried or housed at the IMC–a gift and a record for future generations of dreamers.
The Artists
Elissa B.G. Mullins
I’m Elissa Blake (Grove Mullins), a poet and librarian local to Urbana, Illinois. A self-appointed language-wrangler, I’ve written and spoken to local audiences on topics ranging from sleep and disability justice to psychedelics and the mystical experience. As a person with narcolepsy, I clock more hours than most in dream-time; I’ve accumulated a decade’s worth of handwritten dream journals, and learned to embrace the intrusions of REM-sleep (“dream attacks”) that subtly warp and color my waking experience. Most recently, my creative experiments have inclined toward the intense brevity of haiku and the gentle monotony of cross-stitch; the raw poetry of my dreams and the infinite interplay of mood and color.
Alder E. Philipps
I’m Alder Philipps, an Urbana-based artist and lover of dreams. I work primarily in digital collage, using original photographs of local landscapes and current events. In 2020, I contributed to a collaborative project called Community in Isolation, where we created a card deck with symbolic images for self-reflection, themed around collective experiences during COVID-19 quarantine. I’m a longtime dream admirer and have come to know dreams as a source of creative inspiration and healing. My dreamlife has been cultivated through dream journaling, study of dream symbology, and participation in dream sharing circles. For this project, I’m excited to bring my present-day dreams into waking life through mixed media collages.
