Nobody has ever seen someone else's dream. A painter can show only a person asleep, and must decide where sleep ends and the vision begins: at the edge of the bed, behind a curtain, or nowhere at all.
These twelve famous dream paintings run from Piero della Francesca's Dream of Constantine, painted around 1460, to Salvador Dalí's bee and pomegranate of 1944.
One of the twelve, Henri Rousseau, even had to explain in writing what a parlor sofa was doing in his jungle.
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How These Were Chosen
A dream leaves no trace in the room and has a single witness. To paint one, an artist starts from a body lying still and adds what that mind sees: an angel at the foot of the bed, the dead walking again, a ladder to heaven.
The border between the sleeper and the vision can be a curtain, a cloud, the edge of a mattress, or nothing at all, so that the dreamer and what appears to him share the same air.
Each of the twelve paintings shows the dreamer inside the frame, which ruled out visions with no sleeper. Every artist appears once. Prints, made in many copies, were left out.
12. Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (about 1944)
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening is the long title the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí gave to a small wooden panel painted around 1944. His wife, Gala, sleeps naked in midair above a flat rock that floats over a calm sea.
Above her, a giant pomegranate splits open, and a chain of creatures bursts out of the fruit: first a fish, then two leaping tigers, then a rifle. The point of its bayonet has almost reached her arm.
The idea behind that chain answers an old question, how long a dream lasts. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese doctor who founded psychoanalysis, retold a famous case in 1900, in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams.
The dreamer was Alfred Maury, a French scholar who ran experiments on his own sleep. Lying ill in bed, he found himself in the Terror, the months of the French Revolution when a special court sent thousands to the guillotine.
Maury faced the revolutionary leaders Robespierre and Marat, was condemned and felt the blade fall. He woke in fright. The headboard of his bed had fallen onto his neck, at the very spot where the blade had struck.
The case puzzled scholars, and a French journal, the Revue philosophique, debated it. If the falling headboard woke Maury, then the whole trial had played out in the instant between the blow and the waking.
Dalí's title takes that side and gives the dream a single second. In his version, a bee circling a small pomegranate plays the part of the falling headboard, and the bayonet is how the sleeper's mind sees the sting about to wake her.
Close to Gala, everything stays small: the little pomegranate, the bee, two drops of water floating beside her. Those few things come from the waking world.
The giant pomegranate above her is the same fruit grown to the size of a dream. Between the bayonet and her arm lies a thin strip of empty air, and that gap is the second of the title, the instant before she wakes.
At a Glance
Artist: Salvador Dalí (1904 to 1989)
Painted: About 1944
Medium: Oil on plywood panel
Size: 51 × 41 cm (20.1 × 16.1 in)
Where to see it: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
About This Painting
What is the symbolic meaning of the pomegranate in art?
Its many seeds made it a symbol of fertility and marriage, and in mythological paintings it belongs to Venus as a sign of desire. Through the myth of Proserpina, who ate its seeds in the underworld, it also came to stand for resurrection and immortality, and it appears often in paintings of the Virgin and Child.
11. Pablo Picasso, The Dream (1932)
The Dream, painted by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso when he was fifty, shows a young woman asleep, sitting up in a red armchair. Her head tips to one side, one breast is uncovered and her hands rest folded in her lap.
Behind her runs a wallpaper of diamonds, topped by a molding. Picasso dated The Dream to the day, January 24, 1932, and his model was Marie-Thérèse Walter, then his secret lover. Yet the title promises a dream, and the room shows no sign of one.