Surrealism took a fair stab at the iconography of sleep. But "Dreams," part one of the Hirshhorn's "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image," puts the curio-cabinet pictures of Dali and Magritte to shame.

Dali­ knew motionlessness hamstrings dreamworld explorers — hence his contribution to Hitchcock's "Spellbound." Translating the tropes of paintings into a cinema set piece did not, however, take full advantage of what's already an oneiric medium.

Blackening its second-floor spaces and indicating the path with arrows projected on the floor, the Hirshhorn takes us from the banal yet captivating voyeurism of John Giorno snoozing through Andy Warhol's "Sleep" all the way to Michael Bell-Smith's unsettling "Up and Away," which slips flat video game backgrounds vertically past one another, sucking the eye endlessly into depths that don't exist.

A number of projected pieces insert the viewer into the picture. Entry to the show is through the backlit blood-orange curtain of Douglas Gordon's "Off-Screen," an elegant piece of low-tech theatrical magic that makes a show of the shadows of people who have gone before.

Shadow becomes sculpture as bodies carve the haze-filled space between projector and image in Anthony McCall's "You and I Horizontal." It's an Apollonian laser show, with still frames of hard-edged geometric plots intersecting the figures passing through.

Dreams normally evaporate on awakening because the brain's memory-making processes don't convert the workings of the nighttime imagination into anything you can keep. In other words, dreams are real, they just don't last.

The piece that best walks the tightrope between experience and evanescence is Stan Douglas' "Overture," a looping trip along a mountain railway that reinforces itself with the next frame as the last slips from view.

It's been almost four years since the 'horn invited visitors to forgo a decent night's rest with its tribute to Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho." Although "Dreams" doesn't require sleep deprivation, you could do worse than to go when your head is light and your stomach's in freefall.

Two hours should do it. You can dream as long as you like.

--Glenn Dixon, Express (Feb. 21, 2008)