Ascolta l'arte e mettila da parte

May 15th, 2026

 EPISODE N.19

There is a moment, every night, when we lose control.

The body lets go, the eyes close… and something else takes over. It is not entirely imagination, and not entirely reality. It is an ambiguous, elusive space. It is the dream.

Since ancient times, humanity has tried to understand what happens in that mysterious realm.
Why do we dream? Who is speaking in our dreams? And above all: can we trust what we see while we sleep?

In the 2nd century AD, a Greek author, Artemidorus of Daldis, wrote what we can consider the first great manual on dream interpretation: the Oneirocritica. For him, dreams are signs, messages, codes to be deciphered. They are meant to reveal the future.

Many centuries later, in 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.
And everything changed. Dreams no longer came from the heavens. They came from within.
They became the language of the unconscious, the place where desires, fears, and memories disguise themselves in order to emerge.

Between Artemidorus and Freud stretches a long history made of questions, visions, and attempts at interpretation. And in this history, art has played a fundamental role. Because dreams… are images. And painters, more than anyone else, have tried to give them form.

In the history of art, we can recognize different types of dreams.

There are prophetic dreams: like that of Saint Ursula, who is told of her future martyrdom, or Saint Joseph, guided in his sleep by the angel of God.
There are inspiring dreams: visions that shape lives, that found religious orders — like those of Saint Romuald or Saint Francis.
And there are deceptive, unsettling dreams: where what we see does not enlighten, but confuses, disturbs, destabilizes.

But today… I do not want to tell you about the most famous dreams. I want to focus on three lesser-known images. Three dreams that make us reflect, rather than offering answers.

The first is the dream of a woman. But not just any woman.

We are in Bologna, in the 14th century. The painter Vitale degli Equi, also known as Vitale da Bologna, shows us an intimate, almost domestic scene.

The fresco, though badly damaged, still reveals a young woman lying on a bed, fully dressed.
Her hand rests against her cheek, suggesting not deep sleep, but a light doze, the kind that restores energy.

And yet, one detail changes everything. The blue garment… and above all, the halo. This woman is the Virgin Mary. If not for these signs, the naturalness of the scene might make us think of an everyday moment, almost a genre scene.

That Mary dreamed is entirely plausible. But no Gospel recounts her dreams. So… what are we seeing?

The image is filled with enigmatic details: closed books in a small cabinet, two miniature cities, a woman reading at the foot of the bed, and a small tree that seems to grow from Mary’s womb.

To better understand this scene, we can turn to another work, better preserved: a panel by Simone dei Crocifissi, pupil of Vitale.

Here, the dream becomes clearer.

Mary is seeing the destiny of her son. Christ appears crucified on the Tree of Life, which grows directly from her body. The meaning of the sacrifice is made explicit through a powerful symbol: the pelican, which pierces its own breast to feed its young with its blood: an image of redemption.

But one question remains.

Who is the woman reading?

She has no halo. She is not a saint. So perhaps the key lies precisely in the book.

If it is not Scripture, it may be a prayer. And indeed, at the time this iconography emerged in Bologna, a widely circulated devotional text was spreading throughout Italy: a kind of prayer or incantation, structured as a dialogue between Mary and her son.

Mary dozes off. Christ appears to her and asks: “Were you sleeping, or keeping watch?”
And she recounts her terrible dream, the crucifixion.

Christ confirms the truth of the vision and adds:

“My mother, this is not a dream, but the truth. And whoever recites this prayer three times a day shall never see the pains of hell, but will find the gates of paradise open.”

We may imagine, then, that the woman is reading that very text. And that the image itself is, in a sense, its visual translation. The two cities may represent Bethlehem and Jerusalem: the beginning and the end.

The fresco was located in the church of Mezzaratta, along a pilgrimage route leading to the hill of the Osservanza. There, a lay confraternity — the Company of the Good Jesus — assisted pilgrims and the poor. For them, this text was familiar. They carried it with them, almost like a talisman.

And so the image must have felt, at once, mysterious… and deeply recognizable.

– MUSIC –

The second dream is of a completely different nature.

It is not a private vision. It is a sign that changes history.

It is the dream of Constantine, depicted in a bronze relief by Andrea Riccio, now preserved at the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice.

Originally, the relief decorated an altar in the church of the Servites, which housed a precious relic: a fragment of the titulus of the True Cross.

Riccio does not represent the famous vision in the sky. Instead, he focuses on what comes after. Unable to fully understand the sign, Constantine falls asleep. And in a dream, Christ appears to him.

The scene is crowded, dynamic. And yet the emperor stands out clearly: seated, thoughtful, supporting his face with his hand. He is not fully asleep. He is suspended. And it is precisely in this in-between state that he receives the answer. Here, the dream does not create the sign. It interprets it.

And the next day, Constantine will act. By marking the sign of the cross on the foreheads of his soldiers, he will win the war in the name of Christ and make Christianity the religion of the empire.

But not all dreams guide us. Some suffocate us. They are nightmares.

The neurologist Ernest Jones described them as a sensation of oppression, of physical anguish.
For the ancients, however, this was not just a symptom, but a demon:  a being that literally sat on the sleeper’s chest. The very word “incubus” comes from the Latin meaning “to lie upon.”

This idea takes powerful visual form in the painting The Nightmare by Johann Heinrich Füssli:
a young woman lies supine, her body abandoned in an unnatural pose, while a monstrous creature presses down on her chest. Here, the nightmare is no longer just a story, it becomes a physical weight, an oppressive presence.

But it is with Francisco Goya that everything changes.

In his print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, created around 1799 as part of the series Los Caprichos, there is no longer any external demon.

This was not a commissioned work, nor was it intended for a church. It was a personal project, conceived for print circulation, aimed at an educated audience shaped by the ideals of the Enlightenment.

The Caprichos are a sharp critique of society: superstition, ignorance, corruption.

And this image stands at their core.

A man — perhaps Goya himself — sleeps, slumped over a table. And around him gather creatures of the night: owls, bats, ambiguous presences. These are not divine visions.
They are fears. And most importantly, they do not emerge from darkness alone. They emerge when reason falls asleep.

The title is ambiguous: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”… but it may also suggest that when reason sleeps, monsters arise.

This is not a rejection of reason. It is a warning. Without it, we are left at the mercy of our own shadows.

And perhaps, at this point, we return to our initial question.

What is a dream? A divine message? An enigma to be deciphered? A deception? Or a truth we cannot accept while awake? Perhaps all of these things at once. Perhaps none of them. Because the dream escapes us. It dissolves the moment we try to grasp it. It speaks… but in a language we never fully understand.

And perhaps that is precisely its power: to remain, always, just beyond our comprehension. An image that passes through us. A voice we cannot entirely translate.

And so tonight, when you close your eyes…who knows who will speak.

All that remains for me is to wish you sweet dreams.

READ THE ARTICLE IN ITALIAN

Artworks:Vitale degli Equi, Il sogno della Vergine, 1353-55, affresco trasportato su tela, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna; Simone dei Crocifissi, Il sogno della Vergine, 1355-60, tempera su tavola, Pinacoteca Nazionale; Andrea Riccio, Il sogno di Costantino, 1500 ca., bronzo, Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro, Venezia; Francisco Goya, Il sonno della ragione genera mostri, 1797, acquaforte e acquatinta, Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, Madrid.

Music: Charles Chaitman