Wellcome to my Nightmare
Sleeping and Dreaming - exhibition at the Wellcome Institute
Not for nothing are we named “Nightmare Abbey”, as we do look into our nocturnal cinemas. So, when we saw that the Wellcome Collection was holding an exhibition entitled “Sleeping and Dreaming”, we arranged to go.
The Wellcome Collection is housed just over the road from Euston Station and is the public home for the one and a half million objects that were collected by drugs baron Sir Henry welcome and all relate in some way to medicine.
One section of the sleep exhibition was given over to those people who have attempted to stay awake for long periods and then what damage this did to them. We can survive for longer without food than without sleep. Some of the weirder pieces in the show included a kit from the 1770s to resuscitate those feared close to death and it blew tobacco smoke into the rectum! From the 1820s came a device designed to tune the nerves.
The displays also included both art inspired by dreams and serious attempts to actively influence what people dream about using tachyistoscopic and tachyacoustic equipment. Imagine the possibilities for advertising if that could be made to work.
Upstairs we found another eclectic exhibition of items from the collection with the title “Medicine Man”: a four thousand year old trepanned skull from Jericho; late nineteenth century anti-masturbation devices; a shrunken head (Tsantsa); an Incan mummy; a nineteenth century brass corset; Japanese sex toys from the 1930s; a set of Sioux child’s amulets; a Congolese “Nail Figure” fetish; an ivory opium pipe; a Gabonese reliquary; and, who wouldn’t want Charles Darwin’s walking stick after seeing it, made from whale bone with an ivory skull handle.
So, if you like weird stuff, include the Wellcome Collection in your regular itinerary.
Rutland Dedlock
