What do Google, the sewing machine, and the periodic table have in common? They were all inspired by a dream. While ‘dreamers’ are not often taken seriously, there is a serious need for more dreams, believes Sharonna Karni Cohen, Founder of Dreame, a venture which turns people’s dreams into art.
This year, inspired by International Peace Day, on September 21, which often goes unnoticed in Israel, Cohen spearheaded a collaborative effort to inspire more dreams. The hour-long commemoration took place at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, on a mission to gather dreamers together and share dreams for 2030, giving focus to peace, sustainability, and the environment. Other collaborators included the British Embassy in Israel, The Ramon Foundation, EMIS, ZAZ10TS, and the Malchut Production House & Creative Agency.
Dreams were shared by Palestinian, Israeli, and Afghan teenagers, whose dreams shared similar threads of wanting peace, coexistence, and acceptance between people. Palestinian rapper, Sameh Zakout, shared his dream “to not be judged by my ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality. Just treated as a human being, period.”
The event was held in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and was a lead-up to The Big Dream, a project to create the largest collective artwork which began in 2017 and culminated in a spread of over 1,500 yoga mats in Tel Aviv’s Kikar Rabin on Yoga Day.
Since then, Cohen has been on a mission to gather 100,000 dreams from across the world to create the next massive mosaic art piece, which will be unveiled on February 2, 2022, in cities around the world, and will even take a trip to outer space with the International Space Station as part of the ‘Sky’ mission. So far, 40,000 dreams have been collected and will be displayed in Iceland, Australia, Mexico, North America, Japan, and England, to name a few.
To Cohen, a dream is “our imagination and ability to create a world with our minds, which makes it possible to turn it into reality, and this is our superpower. No robot will ever be as powerful as a creative mind. These days, we spend so much time on video calls looking at boxes, but we need to spend more time thinking out of the box.”
For the many cynics she encounters daily Cohen adds: “Between dreaming and not dreaming, why not dream?”
To share your dream, visit here.
