In this article, I share a personal perspective informed by my experience as a visual artist. The article aims to draw parallels between the phenomenon of dreams and art-making, bridging the audience closer to the artistic process. While dreaming is not fully understood as a phenomenon, it is a universal human experience.

Non-artists often wonder how artworks are created and what artists undergo to bring their ideas to life. Creating an artwork involves inspiration, personal perspective, research, collective experience, skill, and knowledge. Regardless of the medium, all artists navigate a unique and complex art-making process. From the initial spark of an idea to the final realisation of an artwork, this journey is deeply immersive, consisting of intuition and conscious decision-making.

Given the intricate nature of this process, I believe that exploring the phenomenon of dreams can surface valuable insights into how an artwork comes to life.

Why compare dreaming and art-making?

First, both processes are complex in their nature. Second, the phenomenon of dreaming is an inborn aspect of human cognition, while art-making is the development of creative skills that come out from the very nature of the mind. Hence, art-making involves the conscious processing of internal and external worlds, culminating in the material body called artwork.

Dreams have been examined through various theoretical lenses. Each examiner has a different approach, and all culminate in a single constellation around the dream phenomenon. The complex cognitive and psychological systems glue the unconscious reservoir with the conscious field. Sigmund Freud (1899) viewed dreams as expressions of repressed desires, while Carl Jung (1964) emphasized their symbolic and archetypal nature, connecting them to the collective unconscious. Cognitive science, such as Allan Hobson’s (1988) activation-synthesis theory, suggests that dreams arise from neural activity that the brain interprets into coherent narratives.

Erik Hoel (2021) further proposed that dreaming functions as a creative mechanism, preventing cognitive rigidity and fostering novel associations—paralleling the artistic process. Philosophically, Merleau-Ponty (1945) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980) explored dreams as a way of reconfiguring perception, allowing for fluid, imaginative transformations that mirror artistic creation.

When reflecting on a personal dream, we can recognize these different views as being part of a singularity. These perspectives highlight the multifaceted nature of dreams, as well as the process and role they have in the psyche.

There is a parallel between dreaming and art-making that I think is significant to explore. I observe similarities between them. Both evolve through a multitude of alterations between percept and concept. While in the dream, a person is simultaneously the encounterer and observer with no control over it. In the art-making process, the person (the artist) undergoes a conscious experience by controlling his observation.

Consider the idea of a tree: it exists both as a percept and a concept in either case. In a dream, the tree appears either in its physical or beyond its physical form but is always imbued with symbolic meaning. The dreamer has no control over the story but instead feels it as it unfolds. Art-making follows a similar trajectory, but the artist has control over the tree’s appearance. The artist may choose how to approach the tree: engaging with the physical aspect of the tree—as percept—or going deeper into the realm of symbolic meanings and concepts.

Thus, we see these two processes developing under the same trajectory and mental layers, with one crucial distinction: the artist is awake and actively engaged in shaping the process and its results, while in the dream engagement and influence come from within, unrestrained by the dreamer. For example, if this tree appears in the dream with its physical shape colored in red, the dreamer cannot do anything else but experience it as it unfolds within. Whereas, in creating an artwork of a tree, apart from experiencing it thematically, the artist can consciously delve into each part of the process while working on the piece consisting of a tree colored in red. However, both processes bear a similar quality: experiencing the world within and without.

Another significant aspect of the dream is exploring a transformative experience of concepts built around an idea. To this point, dreams can also shake the entire system of concepts and beliefs, leading to a transformation of one’s personality.

Dreaming and artistic creation allows for the transformation of ideas, emotions, concepts, and perceptions. Yet, the source of materials for both processes remains the same: the vast inner world of human thought, emotion, feeling, intuition, instinct, and experience. Just as a dream blurs the boundaries between memory and imagination, an artwork materializes through the interplay of the tangible and the intangible, linking the conscious with the unconscious mind.

In the making of an artwork, its process can be seen as a dream directed by an artist. This artist fully chooses how to approach the theme and how to use personal knowledge, skills, and experiences to deliver the idea into an artwork, from internal to external form. The act of art-making deliberately channels the mechanisms of transformation and discovery.

By examining these parallels, we understand closely how an artwork is made—not just as a product of skills and intention, but as an organic process unfolding human’s inherent creativity. Regardless of the type of work they create, all artists undergo the same process. The art-making is a journey that consists of known and unknown stories, much like dreaming and dreams. Whether we are asleep or awake, our minds continue to produce meaning, reshape experiences, and create new realities—one through the unconscious wandering of dreams, the other through the conscious presence of the artist.