Symbols & Meaning
Recording dreams before language: what dream research owes to art
Painters faced the problem researchers still have: dreams resist description. The solutions they arrived at — the incubus on the chest, the impossible architecture, the melting object — became the visual vocabulary we still use.
Anyone who has tried to convey a dream in words knows the difficulty. The atmosphere does not survive summary, the incoherence sounds like carelessness, and the listener receives a sequence of events where the dreamer had an experience.
Visual art has some advantages. It can present incongruity without having to justify it, and it can convey atmosphere directly. The solutions painters found have shaped how we picture dreams — and, arguably, how we describe them.
Fuseli's Nightmare
Henry Fuseli exhibited The Nightmare at the Royal Academy in 1781, and it caused a sensation of a kind the Academy was not used to. A woman thrown back across a bed in a posture of collapse, a squat incubus crouched on her chest, and a horse's head with blank eyes pushing through the curtains.
It is, as a piece of documentation, remarkably accurate to sleep paralysis phenomenology: the supine position, the weight on the chest, the presence, the immobility. Whether Fuseli was depicting an experience he or someone he knew had is unknown, and the correspondence is too precise to be coincidental.
The painting was reproduced in enormous numbers as an engraving. Freud reportedly had a copy in his consulting room. Its imagery has fed back into how the experience is described — the horse is almost certainly a pun on the English word, since the mare of nightmare was never equine, and the horse is now firmly attached to the concept.
Goya
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos — The sleep of reason produces monsters — is plate 43 of Goya's Los Caprichos, published 1799. A man slumped asleep at a desk, owls and bats rising behind him.
The Spanish sueño means both sleep and dream, and the ambiguity is deliberate. Goya's own caption suggests that imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters, but united with reason is the mother of the arts. It is an Enlightenment statement rather than a straightforwardly Romantic one, and the plate is frequently misread as a celebration of the irrational when it is closer to a warning about it.
Dreams are characterised by incongruity accepted without surprise. Painting can do this directly: place two things in one frame that cannot both be there, and the viewer experiences the wrongness without needing an explanation. Literature has to narrate the impossibility, which introduces the surprise the dreamer did not feel. This is why so much of the visual language of dreams comes from painting rather than from writing.
Surrealism
André Breton's 1924 manifesto made the connection explicit, drawing directly on Freud and defining surrealism as the attempt to express the actual functioning of thought in the absence of control by reason.
The techniques the group developed were attempts to access material below deliberate composition: automatic writing, exquisite corpse, and — for several members — deliberate use of hypnagogic states.
Salvador Dalí described his paranoiac-critical method, and his famous practice of dozing in a chair holding a key over a metal plate so that the sound of it falling would wake him at the boundary of sleep. That is a technique for harvesting hypnagogic imagery, and it is the same manoeuvre Edison reportedly used with metal spheres and that a 2021 study at the Paris Brain Institute tested experimentally with positive results.
René Magritte worked differently, and arguably produced the more dreamlike images. His paintings are rendered plainly, in ordinary light, and their strangeness comes from a single displaced element treated as though unremarkable — which is precisely the structure of dream incongruity.
Giorgio de Chirico, who preceded and influenced the group, produced the empty arcaded squares with impossible shadows and distant trains that have become shorthand for the dream atmosphere of unease without event.
Beyond Europe
The tradition is not confined to Western art.
Japanese ukiyo-e and later work depicted dream and ghost imagery extensively, with conventions for representing the dream state — the dreamer visible with the dream content in a bubble or cloud above them, a device that survives in comics.
Mughal and Persian miniature painting depicted prophetic dreams within elaborate architectural frames, using the frame itself to mark the shift in reality level.
Aboriginal Australian painting is frequently described in Western contexts as depicting Dreamtime, which — as discussed elsewhere on this site — is a mistranslation. The works encode country, ancestral journeys and law rather than dreams in any sense an English speaker would recognise.
Film
The medium best suited to the problem, because it can cut.
The jump cut, the dissolve, the impossible continuity, the shift in location mid-scene — these are formal devices that reproduce dream discontinuity directly rather than describing it. Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou (1929) was explicitly constructed from dream imagery with the stated rule that no image admitting rational explanation would be accepted.
The consequence is that film has become the dominant source of how people expect dreams to look — soft focus, desaturation, slow motion — none of which corresponds to how dreams are actually reported. Dream reports describe experience that felt entirely normal and fully vivid at the time.
Which is a small demonstration of the same effect the dream colour research documented: what people say about their dreams is shaped by the representations available to them.
