Dürer’s later "Dream Vision," done close to thirty years after his Apocalypse series, presents a much purer, more elementally emotional and psychological view of the final judgment. Here, we have a reversion away from the New Testament apocalypse stories to the flood in Noah’s times. The landscape of "Dream Vision" is sparse and spare – and unpopulated – in marked contrast to the bursting scenes of the earlier works. The agent of death and destruction in "Dream Vision" is no longer a personification or an angelic creature but rather an element, water – symbolic of baptism or purification and rejuvenation. The "Dream Vision" is lonely – marking Dürer’s movement from a shared notion of judgment to one individually experienced.  

Differences between the "Dream Vision" and "Temptation of the Idler" are many and important. "Dream Vision," unlike "Temptation," lacks a symbolic language. Its scene is intimate and immediate, while the scene of the "Temptation" requires study and interpretation. "Dream Vision" is spare, even empty – an attempt at capturing the myopia of dream experience, while "Temptation" is full of elements, placed more for interpretive purposes than for verisimilitude. The perspective into the "Dream Vision" puts the viewer of the painting in the position of the dreamer while "Temptation" allows the viewer to approach the dream from the outside, as analyst. In this way, "Dream Vision" evokes a direct emotional reaction from the viewer (in line with that of the dreamer) while "Temptation" produces an intellectual or rational/reasoned response. Finally, while "Temptation" has at its heart a moral or didactic message about human behavior while "Dream Vision" seems to lack any such element; it is pure emotion: fear. This emotional purity makes it more psychological and hence a more "modern" depiction of the dream state. That the "Dream Vision" was done at the height of the Lutheran challenge (with which Dürer sympathized) to the authority of Catholic Church (of which Dürer was a lifelong adherent) might account in part for these changes in focus and emphasis.