Dreams Hardcover by Markus Eisen

Product Details

• Publisher: Prestel (2026-10-06)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 128 pages
• ISBN-13: 9783791394695
• Item Weight: 656.3 grams
• Dimensions: 24.77 x 17.78 x 1.96 cm

This evocative book traces the ways artists have envisioned the dreamworld — from prophetic vision and sacred visitation to fantasies, nightmares, and surreal inventions.

Spanning millennia and a wide range of artistic forms, this volume brings together a diverse selection of works that show how dreams have stirred imagination, shaped belief, and opened pathways to other states of consciousness. 

Sculptures, painted panels, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, temple reliefs, narrative cycles, drawings, prints, photographs, collages, and street art reveal how artists working in different contexts and historic eras have turned to dream imagery to express wonder, fear, longing, and transformation. 

Across varied media, readers encounter images that frame dreams as divine messages, moral warnings, spiritual encounters, psychological disturbances, and powerful tools to free the artistic imagination. Devotional scenes and prophetic narratives give way to more inward, fragmented, and surreal explorations of the dreaming mind.

• Impeccably produced and extensively illustrated.
• Features work by Giotto, Rembrandt, Fuseli, Goya, Magritte, and Kusama.
• Reflects on the context, atmosphere, and symbolism, of each artwork across two pages.
• Compiles artwork that reflects the idea of dreaming from antiquity to contemporary day.
• Reveals how artists have sought to give form to experiences that resist logic and language.

A gorgeous gift book that provides a layered study of the dream as artistic subject and cultural mirror.

About the Author

MARKUS EISEN is an art historian based in Munich, Germany.