Hours & Events

Sept 1 through September 17

Saturdays & Sundays, 12pm to 5pm

September 1

Summer First Friday OPENING, 5pm - 7pm

Lucid Dream Minigolf: In Search of Lost Time is a traveling, existential, heartfelt, pop-up minigolf course and interactive theater piece. Adult focused but kid friendly.

Our project aims to spark a sense of delight and playfulness creating a storytelling experience that uses the medium of minigolf as performance theater and interactive narrative with deeper themes of shared experience, of overcoming a sense of being behind in one's life, of being lost, and resiliency. The main character, The Swamp Monster (a bioluminescent pet alligator flushed down the toilet by a neglectful owner in Manhattan who then swam their way up the Hudson in search of refuge), has had a hard past couple of years. They aren't where they thought they would be at this point in their life. In a misguided, but understandable, attempt to fill that hole in themselves, they have stolen another character that represents time itself, Tyme the Gnome of Infinity. You as a player must go on a quest to search for and free Tyme by playing holes that represent your own autobiographical past (The Pyramid of What Was), present (The Abyss of What Is), and future (The Winds of What May Be). The game isn't what you think it is and neither is your life. It's more beautiful and connected than we often realize.

Take something familiar, fun, and accessible to all (minigolf), flip it upside down and imbue it with interactive art pieces, guided imagery, and narratives that playfully engage with deeper ideas and science designed to cultivate imagination. It’s the power of transcendental humanism through the gonzo absurdity of performance theater putt-putt. If Station Eleven, Sleep No More, the science of imagination, and an abandoned minigolf course all had a baby together, that baby would be this project.

Origin story: from a face shield factory to minigolf

From the fire and ashes of disaster grew the seeds of friendship and minigolf. When covid first hit, we helped to lead efforts to make face shields for a local hospital and nursing homes in the Hudson Valley, coordinating efforts across makerspaces, sourcing material from the local library system, and turning an art center, the Basilica Hudson, into a mass assembly line.

After months of making face shields, we were happy to have served but run a little ragged. We needed a mental break and wanted a creative project that was purely silly and personal. The idea of building a gonzo minigolf course was born! Bren began designing holes and reaching out to makerspace and artists friends to turn his 8’x10’ deck into a minigolf course. Liam quickly came on board and began to help develop the characters, story, and performance theater aspects. After having so much fun creating 3 holes in such a small space, we decided to share it with others.

We ended up rigging out Bren’s apartment with the lights and fog machine from the Avalon Lounge rock club, and running it as an underground performance piece, creating an anonymous instagram account, mailing golden tickets to interested players, and developing an 1hr long interactive narrative to play through.

It’s no coincidence that minigolf first became popular during the fallout of the Great Depression and helped, in a small way, to desegregate public places as a result of it’s whimsical escapism and general accessibility. In the aftermath of global pandemic and great division, there seems to be no more appropriate time to double-down on the whimsy, make it even more accessible by going mobile, and meld it with elements of performance theater and an alchemy of ideas informed by the arts and sciences.

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