The Art of Depicting Dreams.
How Dreams – and Nightmares – Have Influenced Art History

Michel Foucault posits that dreams are the starting point of the imagination. Indeed, throughout history, countless artists have taken inspiration for their art from dreams. During the Renaissance, artists often represented the subject of the Biblical dream, the divine vision communicated by God, while the 19th-century Symbolists chose to express subjective psychological and spiritual states through dreams, and the Romantics expressed feelings verging on the mystical, often through visions and dreams. The Surrealists, in turn, used images and stories that came to them in dreams to create wild, bizarre artworks reflecting their subconscious states, as a window into their deepest selves. We take a tour of artworks influenced by dreams throughout the history of art.

1. Raphael, Jacob’s Dream, 1518

In the Renaissance, dreams were depicted in art strictly as a religious experience. Biblical stories in which people had dreamlike visions and encountered higher beings and divine revelations through dreams were popular topics for artists. Raphael’s Jacob’s Dream (1518) is one such depiction of a divine vision: Jacob encounters God in a dream as he journeys out of the promised land. In the dream, Jacob sees a ladder reaching up to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and descending it. God stands beside Jacob and tells him he is the chosen one, and that he and his offspring will return to this land and the land will belong to them. In Raphael’s painting, we see Jacob sleeping with his head on a rock and God hovering above the angels, dark clouds parting on either side to reveal the golden light of heaven. Jacob may be fast asleep, but the composition of the painting with God and the angels taking centre stage ensures that we understand this dream as a very real vision.

2. Albrecht Dürer, Dream Vision, 1525

One of the first artists to actually paint a dream of their own as opposed to divine visions was Albrecht Dürer. His watercolour painting Dream Vision from 1525 was inspired by a dream he had on June 7, 1525. The dream consisted of a flood which he described as great waters falling from heaven, accompanied by wind and roaring. Dürer was greatly affected by the dream, reporting afterwards: “When I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time.” He painted this watercolour very quickly in order to remember the dream, filling half of the page with his written explanation of the dream.

3. Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797-1799

Francisco Goya did several series of etchings during his career. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the 43^rd etching in his Los Caprichos series, which presented dark satires of eighteenth-century Spain. In this etching, Goya depicts the sleeping artist as the Enlightenment value of Reason, which he asserts is necessary to fight evil. The figure’s peaceful sleep is interrupted by the predatory monsters attacking him from all around, representing pre-Enlightenment superstitions and practices that Goya felt held the country back from modernization and progress. Goya believed that he, “like mankind in general, [could] only overcome superstition, ignorance, and irrationality by uniting reason with fantasy.” The dream and the dreamer therefore presented a perfect vessel for Goya’s message.

4. William Blake, Visionary Heads, 1818

The English poet and painter William Blake made a series of black chalk and pencil drawings starting in 1818 at the request of the artist and astrologer John Varley. Varley believed in the existence of spirits, but was frustrated that he could not see them. Blake claimed to have daily visions since childhood, and so the two started working together to summon spirits. The subjects of the Visionary Heads drawings are what resulted from these meetings: historical and mythical characters that appeared to Blake in visions during his nights with Varley. Some of the characters that together make up the Visionary Heads include David, Solomon, Bathsheba, Job, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Christ, Muhammad, Merlin, John Milton, Voltaire, and Satan. The most famous in the series is The Ghost of a Flea, a miniature painting inspired by a vision Blake had during a session with Varley. The muscular, nude flea is depicted with its tongue sticking out of its mouth, about to feast on a bowl of blood.

5. Odilon Redon, In the Dream, 1879-1899

Symbolist artist Odilon Redon was once nicknamed the “king of dreams” by art critic Thadée Natanson, as he often depicted scenes from the depths of his subconscious and inner worlds. Redon’s paintings are sensual evocations of his experiences and feelings related to the mysteries of nature. In a series of lithographs, the Noirs, which he created between 1879 and 1899, Redon depicted a terrifying world of hybrid creatures seeming to have appeared out of a nightmare. Images include a spider with the face of a human and a giant flying eyeball. Though he initially created art almost exclusively in black and white like with the nightmarish Noirs, Redon turned to pastels in the 1890s, feeling comforted by the colours. These blurry, colourful paintings came to define Redon’s dreamy painterly style, moving his art from the realm of the nightmare to the realm of the dream.