Three beds, arranged in a gleaming, sculptural, Y-shaped aluminum apparatus: They invite you not just to lie down but to surrender to suggestion, hovering at the edge of consciousness. You climb in, and once settled, a choreography begins—colored beads of light gently dipping and soaring, subtle pulses of sound, an almost imperceptible twirl of wands above. You feel your body respond before your mind has fully caught up.
The experience is disorienting, intimate, and utterly compelling. For a few suspended moments, the line between wakefulness and dreaming blurs, reminding us that perception is pliable and that science, when dressed in light and sound, can feel like pure magic.
Titled Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, this immersive sleep and perception installation by German artist Carsten Höller proposes the inconceivable—shared dreaming—while tapping into a cultural moment obsessed with tracking the body and measuring and optimizing even our most private of experiences.
And it happens to take place in a museum gallery. It was created in Cambridge for the new MIT Museum exhibition “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” (on until August), which traces the rhythms of life itself: circadian patterns, light’s command over the body, and the delicate architecture of alertness and rest. Vital daylight, the body’s clock, and sleep cycles converge across 18 works that blend science and art, from immersive soundscapes to visualizations of circadian patterns and reflective spaces where you observe your own heartbeat and alertness in new ways.
In Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams, Höller’s goal is to explore whether dreams—usually private and uncontrollable—can become guided and communal. It draws on emerging research suggesting that dreams can be influenced in real time by sensory cues such as light, sound, and motion. The programmed sequence of stimuli—pulsing colored lights, spatialized sound, and subtle atmospheric effects—is carefully timed to influence the transition from wakefulness toward sleep and to potentially steer dream content.
Participants often report a liminal feeling—drifting between alertness and sleep—rather than fully falling asleep during the short session. Yet even without sleeping, the synchronized motion and light create a strong sense of altered time and bodily awareness.
Indeed, the pre-sleep state is paramount here, as MIT Museum Studio director Seth Riskin explains in his lab, directly under MIT’s Great Dome in the heart of the campus. “Carsten says the experience is the material he’s working with,” says Riskin, who collaborated with Höller and dream scientist and MIT alum Adam Haar Horowitz on Hotel Room #2. “All the attention is on the conscious experience, but it’s this semiconscious experience that is the artwork. Because of the unusual character of the environment, you can’t help but pay attention to that, but you start losing conscious control, losing a sense of time—it morphs into something else. And once you start drifting off, that’s the thing this is all about.”
Beforehand, I’m preoccupied with what to expect and, well, optimizing my experience. But moments before we put our heads down, Riskin assures me, “There are no rules. Let us journey and enjoy.”
Emerging from the chamber about an hour later, we compare experiences. Riskin and I both are reminded of being on an airplane, while my partner felt as if he were sleeping on the subway. Earlier, MIT Museum Studio technical assistant Hannah Zahr said her first time in the piece had evoked childhood memories of riding through a tunnel in a car, lights whizzing by. “It was so soothing to me because it reminded me of falling asleep in the car as my parents were driving home—and then you’d wake up and magically you’re home, you know? But that was the last thing that you would see.” (Zahr noted similar reports all connected to movement among the group of 30 who tested the piece in the lab.)
Across time, many societies have treated dreams not as solitary fantasies but as shared spaces where groups search for meaning. In ancient Greek healing temples, pilgrims slept side by side, hoping the god Asclepius would send curative visions, which priests then interpreted for the community. Among North America’s Haudenosaunee Confederacy, dreams were shared each morning and could prompt real-world actions to satisfy the dreamer’s soul. Aboriginal cultures in Australia understand the Dreaming as a collective ancestral reality that individuals access in sleep, while in the medieval Islamic world, scholars such as Ibn Sirin treated dreams as socially meaningful signs worthy of expert interpretation.
Höller has long operated in the territory between science and perceptual play, with a longstanding artistic and scientific interest in sleep, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. He sees sleep as an unstable zone where reality, biology, and subjectivity blur, and his work often invites viewers to experiment with that boundary rather than simply observe it, with wandering robotic beds, revolving-disk hotel rooms, and elevated beds you sleep in after brushing your teeth with dream-inducing toothpaste. The first iteration of Hotel Room took place in Basel, Switzerland, with a bed for just one person and an environment intended to prompt dreams of flying.
Ultimately, however, Hotel Room #2 succeeds best when read metaphorically rather than literally—not as a machine that synchronizes dreams, but as a carefully staged experiment in belief, vulnerability, and the contemporary desire to engineer even our most intimate biological rhythms. Because what stays with you is less the technology than the suspension of disbelief it cultivates. You lie down beside strangers, surrender to dim lighting and the sensation of gentle motion, and the familiar boundary between wakefulness and dreaming briefly feels negotiable. In a world increasingly obsessed with biohacking and performance, Höller reminds us that while the body may be malleable, the mind is still delightfully mysterious.
