Dreaming is a chance for the brain to invent without the mind’s control, and that inventiveness is the unconscious version of our waking creativity—except one happens a lot easier than the other.
Those images and sensations that appear to us as we sleep have long been a source of inspiration for some of the world’s greatest works of art, even as dreams came to represent different things over time, i.e. divine encounters, erotic subtext, fictional stories, and so forth.
Some of the greatest works of fiction, music, visual art, or film have been inspired by dreams. Click through to see which artists achieved greatness in their sleep.