D.R.E.A.M. LAB is a mixed-media installation dedicated to protecting Black bodies and minds in their most vulnerable state—sleep. Interweaving sleep neuroscience, Black dream traditions, and emergent technologies, the project explores how dreaming functions as a radical act of liberation. Transforming sleep and dream research into an immersive experience, the exhibition invites Black communities to encounter speculative dream technologies and architectures born from our lived experiences, reclaiming dreaming as a site of healing, imagination, and freedom.
Creator
Mia Imani (Los Angeles) is a spiritual technologist, conceptual artist, and sleep advocate and repair amid structural inequity. She works as a translator of neuroscience, rendering complex sleep science legible through immersive art, storytelling, and ritual, while advocating for ethical science and community-centered development and use of dream technology.
Through installations, films, and performance, she explores the subconscious as a site of liberation and world-building. She is the founder of DreamTV, a research-driven project that maps global dream cultures, advances sleep science, and develops ethical frameworks for dream technologies. She has published the first academic article on dream technology and the radical rest movement and currently leads the first community-centered sleep survey in Los Angeles in partnership with UCLA neuroscientist Dr. Gina Poe. Her work has been presented internationally across Europe and the U.S.