Dreams and Imagination

Every night we create images that do not exist in reality. Artists in every age have tried to capture dreams, visions and nightmares, and so to show what no one else can see. We follow the dream from the messengers of antiquity and the visions of the Middle Ages, through Bosch’s fantastical worlds, Fuseli’s nightmare and Goya’s monsters, to Redon’s floating eyes, Ernst Josephson’s pictures from his illness and the dreamscapes of the Surrealists.

• Messages in Sleep – Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Bosch and the Gardens of the Imagination
• Life Is a Dream – Visions of the Baroque
• Nightmares of the Enlightenment – Piranesi and Fuseli
• The Sleep of Reason – Goya and Blake
• Symbolism – Redon and the Isle of the Dead
• Nordic Dreams – Josephson, Hill and Simberg
• Metaphysics and Surrealism – the Dream as Method