Dream/Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) commented on Goya’s Dream/Sleep of Reason:

“The moral [of Goya’s art] is summed up in the central plate of the Caprichos, in which we see Goya himself, his head on his arms, sprawled across his desk and fitfully sleeping, which the air above is people with the bats and owls of necromancy and just behind his chair lies an enormous witch’s cat, malevolent as only Goya’s cats can be, staring at the sleeper with baleful eyes. On the side of the desk are traced the words, ‘The dream of reason produces monsters,’ It is a caption that admits of more than one interpretation. When reason sleeps, the absurd and loathsome creatures of superstition wake and are active, goading their victim to an ignoble frenzy. But this is not all. Reason may also dream without sleeping, may intoxicate itself, as it did during the French Revolution, with the daydreams of inevitable progress, of liberty, equality, and fraternity imposed by violence, of human self-sufficiency and the ending of sorrow…by political rearrangements and a better technology. The Caprichos were published in the last year of the eighteenth century; in 1808 Goya and all Spain were given the opportunity of discovering the consequences of such daydreaming. Murat marched his troops into Madrid; the Disasters of War were about to begin.”

Aldous Huxley, “Variations on Goya,” On Art and Artists, Morris Philipson, ed., (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), pp.  218-19.

John Ciafalo identifies three fundamental goals of Goya in The Dream/Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters :

       “First, Goya hoped to continue to elevate the status of the visual artist to that of an esteemed Golden Age writer, a project he had begun in the 1780s. Second, he freed himself from certain ethical, moral, and academic constrictions governing compositional conventions, since the protagonist is in a state of oneiric madness at his desk, creating grotesque, preternatural monsters. Goya consequently furthers his public espousal of the particular qualities of his own genius, a notion that underlies his attempt toward Academic reform based upon letters of appeal and his presentation to the institution of small, genre works on tin, including his famous painting, Courtyard with Lunatics. Third, a prime motive for Goya’s change from first to third person depiction is the desire to warn those most apt to purchase his first set of prints (the progressive, pro-Enlightenment, disillusioned ilustrados) and to distance himself from them.”

John J. Ciofalo, “Goya’s Enlightenment Protagonist: A Quixotic Dreamer of Reason,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 424.