Dream within a dream | Masakazu Murakami | Zen foto gallery 2025

Unsigned copies

This photobook takes its title from The World Inside a Pillow, an ancient Chinese story in which the boundaries between dream and reality are blurred. Murakami’s sequence of black-and-white snapshots gradually builds a world of small, recurring symbols, signs, and motifs.

“Indeed, life may be as fleeting as a dream. A dream that emerges and disappears, then fades into oblivion as soon as we wake up – it is like a formless memory, or an incoherent photograph.

Perhaps these photographs, taken half-unconsciously without any intention, offer a glimpse of something similar to the boundary between dream and reality.” - from Masakazu Murakami’s afterword