Masakazu Murakami’s latest photobook draws its title from The World Inside a Pillow, an ancient Chinese tale in which the line between waking life and dreaming dissolves. His carefully sequenced black-and-white photographs form a visually and intellectually compelling flow, slowly assembling a universe of recurring details, signs, and subtle emblems—some of which may exist only in the imagination. Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects, framings, and places (many of them, as Murakami notes in his foreword, now beyond his own memory), Dream Within a Dream can also be read as a meditation on photography itself: a quiet tribute to the pleasure of making images and to the way photographs reshape our perception of the world.

“Life itself may be no more lasting than a dream—appearing briefly, vanishing, and dissolving the moment we awaken. It lingers like an ungraspable recollection, or like a photograph that refuses to settle into clarity. […] Perhaps these images, made instinctively and without conscious intent, touch upon that fragile threshold where dream and reality overlap.”
— from Masakazu Murakami’s afterword