Welcome to a Journal series that explores the ins and outs and random asides of this year’s (2022) Burning Man theme, Waking Dreams: past, present and future visions of our hypnagogic reality.
Cover image graphic design by Tanner Boeger
Waking Dreams: The Legacy of Desert Siteworks
In this episode of the Waking Dreams series we’re going to time-travel back to the earliest days of Burning Man in the desert and reexamine a closely related event that had a formative effect on what we now think of as Burning Man art, the “waking dream” of William Binzen’s Desert Siteworks. Binzen and the …Read More
Waking Dreams: Your No-Shame BRC Street Name Cheat Sheet
Show of hands: have you ever used “hypnogogia” in a sentence? Just as I thought. This year’s Waking Dreams theme offers a blinking headlamp squint into the unknown of our own psyches … and the street names are here to remind us how little we know about what we know. Many are named after Surrealist superstars …Read More
Waking Dreams: A Hopeful Wakeup Call From Halcyon
Everyone interprets a Burning Man theme from their own unique perspective, and that’s just as it should be. Yet occasionally someone gets to the heart of the story in ways I couldn’t have imagined when writing it. After all, a theme is just the shell of a story, waiting to be occupied and lived in. And that’s certainly …Read More
Waking Dreams: Evoking Greener Burns
If Black Rock City and our global community are in fact a manifestation of our collective dreams, what have we been dreaming for the past few years, and what might that look like in the light of day? For many, the pandemic has offered a space for reflection on the need to make our ephemeral …Read More
Waking Dreams: Art from a Dusty Dreamland
After not building our home in the desert for two years, Black Rock City does indeed feel like a distant dream… yet here we are, fast approaching Burning Man 2022; our theme, Waking Dreams, couldn’t feel more appropriate. We exist because people dared to dream, and they dreamed big! Over the years, many artists have …Read More
Waking Dreams: Jason Silva’s Philosophical Phantasmagoria
You may already be familiar with Jason Silva from his appearance on the Burning Man LIVE podcast. Or from his tenure as host of National Geographic’s Brain Games. This amazing philosophical rant, The Human Condition, was recorded in Black Rock City 2019, and then enhanced via AI to add kaleidoscopic art visuals. The resulting video …Read More