10 Masterpieces Plucked from the Artist’s Subconscious

Many consider dreams to be a door into the subconscious mind. The hidden truths they reveal can appear in various forms. Nightmares that evoke disgust, shame, or sorrow or terrify you to your very core are one. Or they could show up as a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime experience you don’t want to wake up from—and just about everything in between. For some, they can even inspire masterpieces, the likes of which the world has never seen. Check out these 10 masterful works of art, music, literature, or film inspired by dreams.

Related: Ten Renowned Artists Who Were Unappreciated in Life

10 “#9 Dream” (1974): John Lennon

After a months-long bout of writer’s block, John Lennon fell into a “half-sleep” and heard a mysterious voice speak to him in a language he didn’t understand. The sound jolted him from his sleep, and the words kept playing in his mind: “Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé.” For the first time in months, lyrics flowed freely. Lennon discussed the process of writing the song in an interview with BBC:

“That’s what I call craftsmanship writing, meaning, you know, I just churned that out. I’m not putting it down, it’s just what it is, but I just sat down and wrote it, you know, with no real inspiration, based on a dream I’d had.”

May Pang, an Apple Corps employee with whom Lennon had a Yoko-Ono-authorized short affair, described the track as one of his favorite songs from his 1974 album Walls and Bridges:

“This was one of John’s favourite songs… because it literally came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote down those words along with the melody. He had no idea what it meant, but he thought it sounded beautiful. John arranged the strings in such a way that the song really does sound like a dream.”^[1]

9 Songs of Innocence (1789): William Blake

William Blake, an English poet, artist, and printmaker, pioneered a printing method he used to create some of his most famous works. These include Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, two illustrated books of poetry that provide a “profound commentary on the human condition, from the purity of youth [Songs of Innocence] to the harsh realities of life [Songs of Experience].” To create the “illuminated” works, Blake used copper plates for the text and illustrations, then finished each picture by hand with watercolors.

Even more unique than the artworks was the inspiration for the printing process used to make them, which Blake described as a dream in which his youngest brother, Robert, visited. Blake was training his brother in drawing, painting, and engraving when Robert suddenly fell ill during the winter of 1787. As Robert died, Blake claims to have watched his spirit rise through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.” Robert continued to visit him after that, eventually showing him the printing method for which Blake would become renowned.^[2]

8 Waking Life (2001): Richard Linklater

An image near the beginning of independent filmmaker Richard Linklater’s movie Waking Life was based on one of his childhood dreams. In the scene, a 9-10-year-old boy wearing a striped T-shirt holds the handle of the family car when his body suddenly begins to float upward. A mysterious force appears to pull him up and away from the world and its “everyday reality.” Holding onto the car with all his strength, the boy resists the temptation to drift away.

“That’s a very early memory of mine,” said Linklater, “I call it a memory, but obviously it took place in a dream state. When you’re a little kid, you don’t really make the distinction that clearly. As you get older, you build up a solid model of real versus unreal, and you start depreciating the unreal. But that moment was weird. I remember it very clearly because it was scary but kind of exhilarating—a sort of non-gravity, upward pull away from what you felt the whole world was, but at the same time, there was some force begging me to stay. That was some strange memory.”^[3]

7 The Red Book (2009): Carl Jung

Carl Jung’s famous Red Book is a compilation of illustrated journal entries from a particularly dark period in his life when he was “haunted” by troubling visions and heard inner voices. He ultimately considered this time a “confrontation with the unconscious.” Though kept private during his lifetime, the entries were found and published after his death.

Journalist Sara Corbett describes The Red Book as “a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part – the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious—that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.”

Or, in Jung’s own words, “All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”^[4]

6 Frankenstein (1816): Mary Shelley + Other Classics

Mary Shelley wrote in her preface to the novel Frankenstein that her inspiration came from a nightmare she had while staying in Geneva with the poet Lord Byron. When she went to sleep, she wrote:

“I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion…”

Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have developed the storyline for The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after a nightmare where he witnessed “a man forced into a cabinet after ingesting a potion that would ‘convert him into a brutal monster.’”

Another example is Bram Stroker’s (1897) Dracula. According to his son, Stoker claimed the book’s inspiration came from a nightmare induced by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper”—one of several theories supported by his notes.^[5]

5 Book of Dreams (1960): Jack Kerouac

Dreams were a consistent source of inspiration for American Writer Jack Kerouac, a pioneer of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. He believed they held a more profound meaning beyond the surface level and eventually published a collection of personal dream journal entries titled Book of Dreams. In it, he writes: “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” Through his writing, Kerouac presents a fascinating insight into his mind and creative process while encouraging readers to examine their dreams as a powerful tool for self-discovery and artistic expression.

The Book of Dreams defies traditional structures and styles by its lack of organization. Divided into sections, each with its theme, there is no straightforward narrative or plot. Kerouac presents the dreams in a stream-of-consciousness style that reflects how dreams unfold. Also thrown into the mix is a dream that inspired Kerouac’s most famous novel, On the Road, in which he saw himself and his friend Neal Cassady driving cross-country in a car.^[6]

4 Dreamcatcher (2001): Stephen King

In 1990, a minivan smashed into Stephen King as he walked down a country road near his home in North Lovell, Maine. He underwent three operations and endured a months-long recovery, during which he experienced vivid dreams. Some of these dreams ultimately led to the creation of one of his best-selling novels, Dreamcatcher, later adapted as a film directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

“The first really strong idea that occurred to me after the accident was four guys in a cabin in the woods,” said King. “Then you introduce this one guy who staggers into the camp saying, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and he brings this awful hitchhiker with him. I dreamed a lot about that cabin and those guys in it.”

Due to the severity of his injuries, King was unable to type. He wrote the story in longhand in just six months. His vivid dreams were the closest he had gotten to the type of otherworldly phenomena present in so much of his work.^[7]

3 The Devil’s Trill Sonata (1799): Giuseppe Tartini

Giuseppe Tartini’s most famous musical piece, “Violin Sonata in G Minor”—more famously known as “The Devil’s Trill”—contains a dreamlike harmonic vibe and a melody that is hauntingly poignant and deeply dramatic. It is one of the most challenging scores to play, even by today’s standards. Equally stirring is the sonata’s inspiration: a nightmare in which Tartini made a deal with the devil.

Tartini explained in an interview with French astronomer Jerome Lalande just moments before his death on February 26, 1770:

“One night, in the year 1713, I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy.

I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the ‘Devil’s Trill,’ but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.”^[8]

2 Persistence of Memory (1931): Salvador Dali

Spanish artist Salvador Dali considered sleep as a tool that could fuel his Surrealist practice due to its connection to the unconscious mind. He would take many brief naps to enter into a “fleeting hyper-associative state,” enabling him to combine unpredictable associations and concepts to challenge perceptions and evoke dreams. It was a technique that became known as the Paranoiac-Critical Method. In the artist’s words, the technique was a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge” that allowed him to tap into his subconscious and explore the depths of his psyche.

The unusual method relied on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations, allowing Dali to accurately create “hand-painted dream photographs” that were simultaneously rotted in realism and fantasy, deliberately designed to confuse the viewer’s eye. He used this method to make many artworks, including one of his most iconic paintings, The Persistence of Memory. Dali hallucinated the entire scene before painting what he saw.^[9]

1 Avatar (2009): James Cameron

More than one idea for a movie scene has come from what James Cameron describes as his “spectacular dreams.” As he said in an interview with GQ magazine, “I have my own private streaming service that’s better than any of the sh*t out there. And it runs every night for free.”

Not only did he dream of the iconic scene in Aliens where Ripley sees the Alien Queen after standing in a silent room full of eggs, but his fantasy epic, Avatar, also came from his subconscious:

“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiberoptic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it… And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something.”

When he woke up, he was so excited that he drew it. The drawing later saved him from at least ten lawsuits after some claimed he’d “beamed the idea out of their head.”^[10]