Dreams and nightmares exhibit to open at world’s oldest psychiatric hospital

Artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former Bethlem hospital patients to go on show

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalisingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions - tears, terror, ecstasy, despair - caused not by real events, but by the brain's activity between sleeping and waking.

Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists. Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world's oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.