A participant taking a photograph of the painting she would sleep under in a Dream-Over at the Rubin Museum of Art.

Darcey Howard had her reasons for showing up at the Rubin Museum of Art in her pajamas. Seeing the Himalayan paintings and multilayered manuscript pages was not one of them. People waiting in line into the night this summer to see the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It was the opportunity to spend a night in a museum,” she said. “I was interested in the access off-hours, of being there when it was almost taboo.”

But there was nothing illicit about her arrival after dark. She did not set off the alarms when she tiptoed into the Rubin, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, and the 12 hours that followed were nothing like “Night at the Museum,” the 2006 comedy that starred Ben Stiller as a new guard coping with fossils gone wild at a more famous and more established museum uptown.

Ms. Howard, 45, had paid $55 to sleep on a gallery floor alongside 80 others who had brought their own pillows, blankets and toothbrushes for what the Rubin had advertised as a “Dream-Over.” The Rubin even had “dream interpreters” — psychologists and psychiatrists led by Edward Nersessian, a professor from Weill Cornell Medical College — to wake them in the morning and take notes on their dreams. Or, at least, what they could remember of them. Continue reading →