Albrecht Dürer: Dream Vision
Dürer’s "Dream Vision," completed decades after the "Temptation of the Idler," presents a very different view of the artist’s relationship to the realm of dreams. In a dramatic watercolor painting, Dürer depicts a scene of an approaching apocalyptic flood that appeared to him one night emerging out of a sparse landscape.
Below the painting, Dürer made the following note:
In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide [June 7-8], I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.
The driving emotion behind this dream is clearly fear, more specifically dread of a coming apocalypse. Such a fear is well in keeping with Dürer’s times and his own personal preoccupation with doomsday scenarios. Whether Dürer took this dream to be a premonition of pending events or simply as a manifestation of his internal psychic state is impossible to know – though rarely in the early 16th century were such dreams interpreted as solely psychological.
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