“The invention of the airplane, a mortal blow to the unconscious.” That’s the debatable thesis of “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!,” Richard Foreman’s latest — and, unfortunately, far from his greatest — barrage of inscrutable imagism. For his 45th work for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the downtown icon has placed a theatrical defibrillator on what he calls “that mental baffle machine,” walloping it with his trademark brand of louche surrealism and hermetic stagecraft.

The set is chaotic even by Mr. Foreman’s standards: With his trademark strings and gnomic bits of writing augmented by biplanes, stuffed animals, and chintzy vases, the stage looks like the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, and your aunt’s attic all rolled into a three-dimensional ransom note. Large video screens take up two walls (a carryover from last year’s “Zomboid”), and Mr. Foreman includes a series of vignettes filmed at a mental hospital in Lisbon, Portugal.

Navigating the onstage clutter is a gothic foursome of beret-andkilt-wearing men and women (Joel Israel, Chris Mirto, Stefanie Neukirch, and Stephanie Silver), plus an occasional fifth performer in aviator garb (James Peterson). The actors mime copulation, climb the walls, and don matching robin’s-egg blue hoods that call to mind a KKK klavern sponsored by Tiffany & Co. Mr. Foreman’s usual array of bleeps, bloops, and flash-photography effects greets the audience throughout.

It seems somewhat ludicrous to compare one Ontological-Hysteric work to another on any sort of qualitative level: Each one feels ripped directly from Mr. Foreman’s dreams, and how can anyone but the dreamer state a preference for one over the other? But perhaps the problem with “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy!” is that it felt like this dream could be anyone else’s. The harping on the perilous state of the unconscious has a generic, almost collegiate feel, as does the ominous appropriation of nursery rhymes. And the less said about the planet Ax-e-tron, to which Mr. Foreman claims to have been taken via flying saucer last year, the better.

Has Mr. Foreman’s play-a-year regimen finally outpaced what had previously appeared to be a limitlessly fertile imagination? If not, why is Mr. Israel now sharing responsibility for the strange, sepulchral pronouncements (“Wrong again, sweetie!”) that Mr. Foreman has traditionally issued from offstage? Insurance in case of another alien abduction? More crucially, why has the video footage taken a step backward since “Zomboid!”?

One’s eyes invariably gravitate toward the screens during these sequences, as do those of the five onstage performers. But the stage-screen interaction was far more evenly matched last year, as the two worlds seemed to share comparable amounts of space in Mr. Foreman’s head. Much of the Lisbon material has a giant question mark and/or X superimposed over it, as if Mr. Foreman is either disputing or proscribing the potency of these images. This newly tentative approach would be understandable if Mr. Foreman were raising the stakes on his film ambitions, but the “Wake Up” footage reads mostly as a tamer retread of “Zomboid!.”

“Here is a world trying to run faster than the unconscious mind,” Mr. Foreman intones about halfway through “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy!” “But who wins such a race. All bets are off, all bets are off.” Maybe so, but if I were a gambling sort, I’d put my money on the unconscious this year. The 2007 model of Mr. Foreman’s dependably mind- and boundary-bending world has fallen a few steps behind.

Until April 1 (131 E. 10th St. at Second Avenue, 212-420-1916).