Art, Dreams, and the Supernatural: A Mini-Essay

     From Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) and Francisco Goya’s El sueño de la razon produce monstrous (1799) to the illustrations in The Dreamer’s Sure Guide (1830) and John Fitzgerald’s The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (1860), visual artists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to explore the origin of dreams. As Nicola Brown highlights, much of these works drew upon a similar theme – “dreams are neither one thing nor the other: they are both physical and supernatural, material and spiritual.”[1] Indeed, their art parallels the era’s growing debate on the true nature of dreams and emphasizes, akin to much of the conversation occurring at that time, the perception that the supernatural played a central role in the dream process.[2] This debate, though, was not unique to just this specific time period. In fact, many ancient civilizations maintained that dreams opened a doorway to the supernatural and became a way to reveal a person’s fate. In certain regions of European, it was believed that a dream which occurred three nights in a row was destined to come true. Likewise, in some early Asian cultures, beliefs upheld that dreams revealed the opposite of what would occur in real life, with a wedding leading to a funeral or a death leading to birth.[3]

Works Referenced

Brown, Nicola. “What is the Stuff that Dreams are Made of?” The Victorian Supernatural. Ed. Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.151-172.

Pickering, David. Dictionary of Superstition. London: Cassell, 1995.

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[1] Brown, 151.
[2] Brown, 151-152.
[3] Pickering, 87-77.