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Welcome to The Art of Dreaming Awake
I'm Sarah, a multidisciplinary visual artist, researcher and Yoga Nidra teacher. My work explores dreaming, lucid dreaming and altered states of perception as tools for creative development — helping artists and creative practitioners use the dream state to generate ideas, work through blocks, and deepen their practice.
Research & training: In 2022 I received Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) funding from Arts Council England to train as a Yoga Nidra teacher and study dream psychology. The funding supported the development of new courses and meditations designed to help creative people use the dream state to generate ideas and work through creative blocks — grounding a practice that had previously lived only in my own studio work in a body of teachable, transferable technique.
Seeing In Dreaming (2021): Funded by Arts Council England, this project explored how the brain generates imagery when reliable sight diminishes — working across painting, the Troxler Effect and the visual language of dreaming and hallucination. This body of work became the foundation for my 2025 solo exhibition, Periphery.
Periphery (2023–2025): In 2023 I received an Arts Council Projects Grant to research and develop Periphery, a solo exhibition built from a dream journaling practice carried out during a personal pilgrimage to stone circles across the British Isles. The project grew out of research and a story rooted in my father's experience of sight loss and Charles Bonnet Syndrome, but as the journey and the journaling unfolded, the resulting twelve works — shown in 2025 at The Point — became a deeply personal exploration of my own peripheral vision and perception: what I notice, and fail to notice, at the edges of my own sight, memory and dreaming. The exhibition included a sound accompaniment by Marcus Campbell and was designed with tactile and accessible elements, including sessions for RNIB groups.
Workshops & facilitation: I deliver Yoga Nidra sessions for artists at key points in their process. At Bloc Projects, I led a session for artists in residence at the very start of their residency, supporting them as they moved into developing a new body of experimental work — using the dream state as a way in to material that hadn't yet found its form.
Talks: "Consciously Creating the Dream: Exploring the Relationship Between Creativity and Lucid Dreaming" — invited talk at the 3rd Annual IASD "Many Worlds of Lucid Dreaming" Conference (2022) and the International Dream Research Conference (2023). Drawing on academic research showing that frequent lucid dreamers score higher on measures of creative personality, the talk explored the reverse relationship — how actively engaging in the creative process, and making artwork from dream imagery, can itself become a trigger for lucidity.
Book a talk or workshop: artofdreamingawake@icloud.com.
New Dream Journals available!
