Dream

Sleep and dreams in art can also take on symbolic and what one would term psychological valences, what would have been called at the times and places of the creation of the art stages or stations in the spiritual journey. The story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus was current in the sixth century and remained popular in both East and West throughout the Middle Ages. Paintings of this theme based in the Sufi tradition depict the seven sleepers as seven stages of human personality and its awakening into full development. Likewise, in some Arab and Muslim traditions, five sleeping, dreaming, and waking figures may represent the five organs of spiritual perception into the care of which one is delivered after regaining consciousness in sleep. The dream as a nexus for the quest for love and knowledge is vividly illustrated in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), an erudite, enigmatic, and beautifully illustrated example of the book arts of the Renaissance that depicts the dream of the protagonist Poliphilo in his quest for his beloved Polia (Greek for "many things"). And the waking of the self from the dream is drawn in parallel with the alchemical process of the refinement of metals in the woodcuts of Giovanni Battista Nazari's (1533–1599) Della Transmutatione Metallica, sogni tre (Brescia, 1599).