Dream mapping
In 1974, in conjunction with the writer David Coxhead, Hiller published the book Dream: Visions of the Night. The previous year, while working on the book, she conducted a group investigation into the 'origin of images and ideas' called The Dream Seminar (1973). In this work, twelve participants met for twelve weeks to discuss their dreaming and their subconscious interaction or 'dream meetings', documenting their progress in notes and audiotapes. For Dream Mapping, Hiller invited 10 participants to develop a graphics system of recording their dreams.
Then, for three nights, they all slept outdoors in an area of the Hampshire countryside with an unusual occurrence of fairy rings, or circles formed by the marasmius mushroom, chosen because of the myth that if you sleep within one of these circles, you can enter fairy-land. Each participant was given a notebook with a map of the dream site on the cover. Every morning they recorded their dreams using the system of note-taking that they had developed earlier. They noted the similarities and differences among the dreams by the making of collective dream maps, in which they took all of the individual diagrams from each day and superimposed them to create a group notation.
For her solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1986, Hiller evolved a form of presentation for this material, displaying the open notebooks in individual vitrines, and reproducing a considerable number of the participants' dream maps and diagrams as large wall drawings.
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