You might have to pinch yourself to ensure that you’re still awake as you walk into surreal dreamscapes of billowing clouds, seemingly endless fields of stars and rooms that appear to bend and shift in physically impossible ways. These installations completely transform gallery spaces into strange new environments that feel disconnected from the waking world. See 15 more surreal art spaces.

Cloudscape Made of Soap Bubbles

Eight pumps around the room in a Japanese gallery continuously alter a surreal cloudscape entitled ‘Foam.’ The installation, by artist Kohei Nawa, is made up of a pliable combination of glycerin, detergent and water that holds its shape and isn’t affected by gravity. The mixture billows gently, making it seem as if visitors are really in the sky.

Spatial Confusion by Sarah Oppenheimer

Doorways bend, walls lift up their corners to provide glimpses into adjacent rooms and skewed apertures make it seem as if people walking in nearby spaces are upside-down. Sarah Oppenheimer’s work seems to distort physical spaces, changing the gallery itself to create confusion.

The Flat Side of the Knife by Samara Goldstein

Do you ever dream about spaces that make no physical sense, with platforms seeming to hover in midair and staircases leading to apparently endless new rooms? With ‘Flat Side of the Knife,’ artist Samara Golden manages to capture that feeling in physical form with a combination of objects made of reflective foam insulation and live video projection. The installation spanned the entire floor-to-ceiling space of MoMA PS1’s first-floor duplex gallery, the various levels representing ‘layers of consciousness.’

Crawling from the Wreckage by Simon Birch

You’ll feel like you stepped inside a 1980s video game with Simon Birch’s ‘Crawling from the Wreckage,’ a highly convincing three-dimensional replication of a computer-generated model. The effect is achieved using glow-in-the-dark paint on gridded furniture within a gridded ‘cell.’

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Dream Rooms 14 Unreal Feeling Art Gallery Transformations

Try to describe a recent dream to someone and the details are likely to dissolve into absolute nonsense. Dreams themselves are ephemeral, fleeting and altogether mysterious. But trying to figure out the connections between different events in the dream and certain components of reality can prove even more confusing than the dreams themselves. This incredible project perfectly embodies the beautiful confusion that is the dreaming mind.

Designer Maria Fischer produced the book “Dream Thoughts” as her diploma project at the University of Augsburg, Germany. The book is a tangible model of the most intangible subject: dreams. Scientific, literary and philosophical texts about dreams are arranged on the pages to give a conceptual understanding of the many different aspects of dreaming.

But like a dream, nothing in this book is quite that simple. Various terms and concepts are “hyperlinked” within the book. Like internet hyperlinks, these physical links lead to related information. But of course, these links are not established with computer code; they are made with thin pieces of thread.

The threads wind their way through the pages, across plains of paper and from one word to its distant partner. Their various colors paint a type of abstract picture with no particular form and no particular meaning other than that of unifying various parts of this unusual text. The winding, flowing forms of the threads offset the more concrete, stable words on the page to create a visual representation of the various parts of the stories our minds create while we sleep.

One page in the book contains a hidden message, spelled out in thread and visible only from the back side. The actual message is hidden within a folded page. Only the negative spaces of thread can be seen from the back, making the message impossible to read. The unreadable message embodies almost everything we know about dream interpretation: there is a message there, to be sure, but it lies obscured behind a curtain of interpretation and foggy memory.