Fondazione Federico Fellini

If dreams are a window into the unconscious, then Federico Fellini left the keys to his locked in a Roman bank vault. His Book of Dreams, a surreal record of the stories revolving around his head at night, has been tied up in legal red tape since the Italian director’s death in 1993. Now, freed at last, it displays all the fireworks of Fellini’s overactive imagination on paper and feels more personal than any straight diary could. ”When I was six,” Fellini once said, “I was convinced we had two lives, one with our eyes open and another with them closed. I baptized the four corners of my bed with the names of movie theatres and the show started as soon as I shut my eyes.” Recent studies have shown that on average, just one percent of our dreams relate to sexual satisfaction. In that, Fellini must have been an exception to the rule.