Behind the screen of someone else’s consciousness: how masters of the brush transferred their dreams to the canvas

Dreams are an interesting thing, because how much our visions can be strange, interesting or frightening. But they all have their own. And thanks to art, you can look behind the screen of someone else's consciousness.

In art, there are many paintings that use sleep as a symbol or mystical inspiration. Where a dream is depicted through myths or painted on a picture of a sleeping person to convey, for example, a state of rest and vulnerability. But what about the paintings where the artists decided to capture their dreams?

Fitz Henry Lane, an American marine painter whose landscapes of the seas and oceans amaze with their skill and softness of colors, in 1862 painted the painting Dream Painting. In his letter, the artist described the history of the creation of the painting. In autumn, in his dream, he saw a richly furnished room, on the wall of which a picture hung. For Fitz Henry Lane, it had a huge effect: it was beautiful for him, and had a magnificent and brilliant color. In his painting, he tried to convey exactly what he saw in his dream. According to him, he managed to convey all the details accurately, but to show all the embellishments of color was not possible. Even so, the Dream can give even a faint idea of what he saw in his dream. The uniqueness of this picture is that it is the only work of the artist that has an imaginary plot. All other works had a certain geography and accurately conveyed all the harbors and shores. Despite the sublime description of the painting in his letter, the painting itself has a more frightening look. It is empty and lifeless: there are no people, the ship is abandoned and destroyed on the desert coast. In the background you can see a strong surf, which was before a powerful storm, it was he who destroyed the ship, and then brought to the ground his body.

Attention is also worthy of the watercolor work of the German artist Albrecht Dürer “Vision of a dream” (Vision) of 1525. The work itself is divided into two parts: visual and text. The drawing itself looks more like a sketch than a finished work, standing out from other classical works of the time. At work, you can see how a huge column of water falls on the ground, and how shower jets fall to the left and right of it. In the second part, in the text, lies the main thing. There, the artist accurately described not only the time of sleep, but also the distance to the epicenter of the disaster, that is, to the collapse of the pole, and his emotions from this vision. He woke up in terror, his body was shaking and he could not recover for a long time. Albrecht Dürer saw the water spill from the sky, how it flooded the whole earth with incredible noise and roar. This is what he portrayed in his work.