Patients' Dreams on Show at World's Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Dreams have long been studied by psychologists and now they are the subject of an exhibition featuring artists who were patients at the world's oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), its sister institution, the Maudsley, and other hospitals.

- Harriet Sherwood

It includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine. She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition, which sold out. "I couldn't talk about my problems, but I could paint them," she said later.

Rachel Johnson, her daughter, said in an interview earlier this year that her mother's stay at the Maudsley "gave her relief from domesticity, and time to paint. We always accepted that painting was like oxygen to her. But when she returned to us, we could see she was still very ill."

Two of Johnson Wahl's paintings are in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind on 14 August.

The centrepiece of the show is a huge installation,